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A DAY WITH A TRAMP 



A DAY WITH A 
TRAMP 

AND OTHER DAYS 



BY/ 

WALTEE A. WYCKOFF 

assistant professor of political economy in princeton 
university; author of "the workers" 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1901 



A 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two C^itd Received 

SEP. 28 1901 

COPYRIGHT ENTRY 

CLASS A'XXc N<#. 
COPY kJ. 



Copyright, 1901, ey 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

Published September, 1901 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



PREFACE 

The following narratives, like those pub- 
lished in the series of " The Workers," East 
and West, are drawn from notes taken during 
an expedition made ten years ago. In the 
summer of 1891 I began an experiment of 
earning my living as a day laborer and con- 
tinued it until, in the course of eighteen 
months, I had worked my way from Connect- 
icut to California. 

In justice to the narratives it should be 
explained that they are submitted simply for 
what they are, the casual observations of a 
student almost fresh from college whose inter- 
est in life led him to undertake a work for 
which he had no scientific training. 

W. A. W. 

Princeton, October, 1901. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Day with a Tramp . . • . . 1 

With Iowa Farmers 41 

A Section- Hand on the Union Pacific 
Railway 91 

"A Burro-Puncher" 127 

Incidents op the Slums . . . .163 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

HE was an American of Irish stock; his 
name was Farrell; he was two-and- 
twenty, a little more than six feet high, and 
as straight as an arrow. We met on the line 
of the Rock Island Railway just west of 
Morris, 111. 

But first, I should like to explain that in 
the course of eighteen months' experience as 
a wandering wage-earner, drifting from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, this was the only day 
that I spent in company with a tramp. 

It was in the character of a workingman and 
not as a tramp, that I began, in the summer 
of 1891, a casual experiment, by which I 
hoped to gain some personal acquaintance with 
the conditions of life of unskilled laborers in 
America. Having no skill, I could count on 
employment only in the rudest forms of labor, 



4 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

and I maintained consistently the character of 
a laborer — a very indifferent one, I am bound 
to own — yet finding it possible everywhere to 
live by the work of my hands. 

I did tramp, it is true, walking in all some 
twenty-five hundred miles of the distance from 
Connecticut to California; but I did it from 
set purpose, discovering that in this way I 
could get a better knowledge of the people and 
the country and of opportunities for work, 
than if I should spend my savings in car-fare 
from place to place. It cost me nothing to 
walk, and I not infrequently covered two hun- 
dred miles in the course of a week, but it gen- 
erally proved that, in actual cash from the sav- 
ings of my last job, I was out quite as much as 
I should have been had I ridden the distance. 
This was because it was often necessary to pay 
for food and lodging by the way, an odd job 
not always being procurable, and the people 
being far readier to give a meal than to take 
the trouble of providing work in payment for 
it. I could little blame them, and I soon 
began to make use of the wayside inns, trust- 
ing for contact with people more to chance 



A DAY WITH A TEAMP 5 

acquaintance and the admirable opportunities 
that came with every event of employment, 
when my savings were gone. 

Tramp is a misnomer, I fancy, as descrip- 
tive of the mode of motion of the members of 
the professionally idle class which in our ver- 
nacular we call hoboes. The tramp rarely 
tramps; he " beats his way " on the rail- 
roads. 

Everyone knows of the very thorough-going 
and valuable work that Mr. Josiah Elynt has 
done in learning the vagrant world, not only 
of America, but of England, and widely over 
the Continent as well, and the light that he 
has let in upon the habits of life and of thought 
of the fraternity, and its common speech and 
symbols, and whence its recruits come, and 
why, and how it occupies a world midway 
between lawlessness and honest toil, lacking 
the criminal wit for the one and the will power 
for the other. 

That the hobo, in going from place to place, 
makes little use of the highways, I can freely 
testify, so far as my limited experience goes. 
His name was legion among the unemployed 



6 A DAT WITH A TKAMP 

in Chicago, and he flocked about railway 
centres, but he was a rare bird along the 
country roads where work was plentiful. 

It is easy to recount individually all that I 
met: a lusty Yankee beggar who hailed me 
as a brother one blistering July day, not far 
from the Connecticut border, when I was 
making for Garrisons; a cynical wraith, who 
rose, seemingly, from the dust of the road, in 
the warm twilight of a September evening, in 
eastern Pennsylvania and scoffed at my hope 
of finding work in Sweet Valley ; a threadbare, 
white-haired German with a truly fine reserve 
and courtesy, who so far warmed to me, when 
we met in the frosty air of late November, on 
the bare, level stretch of a country road be- 
tween Cleveland and Sandusky, as to tell me 
that he had walked from Texas, and was on 
his way to the home of friends near Boston; 
then Farrell, in central Illinois; and finally, a 
blear-eyed, shaggy knave, trudging the sleep- 
ers of the Union Pacific in western Nebraska, 
his rags bound together and bound on with 
strings, and a rollicking quality in his cracked 
voice, who must have had difficulty in avoid- 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 7 

ing work among the short-handed gangs of 
navvies along the line. 

All this is by way of fruitless explanation 
that I myself was not a tramp, but a work- 
man, living by day's labor; a fruitless explana- 
tion, because a reputation once established is 
difficult to dislodge. I have grown accus- 
tomed to references to my " tramp days," even 
among those who knew my purpose best, and I 
had no sooner returned to my university than 
I found that to its members I was already 
known as " Weary/' in which alliterative ap- 
pellation I saw the frankest allusion to a sup- 
posed identification with the " Weary Wil- 
lies " of our " comic " prints. And having 
incurred the name, I may as well lay bare 
the one day that I tramped with a tramp. 

I am not without misgivings in speaking 
of Farrell as a tramp. He had held a steady 
job some weeks before, and our day together 
ended as we shall see; but if I was a hobo, so 
was he, and although clearly not of the strict- 
est sect, and perhaps of no true sect at all, yet 
let us grant that, for the time, we both were 
tramps. 



8 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

The line of a railway was an unusual course, 
for I much preferred the country roads as 
offering better walking, and far more hope of 
meeting the people that I wished to know. 
Heavy rains, however, had made the roads 
almost impassable on foot, and I was walking 
the sleepers from necessity. 

The spring of 1892 had been uncommonly 
wet. The rains set in about the time that I 
quit work with a gang of roadmakers on the 
Exposition grounds. So incessant were they 
that it grew difficult to leave Chicago on foot, 
and when, in the middle of May, I did set out, 
I got only as far as Joliet, when I had to seek 
employment again. 

At the yards of the Illinois Steel Company 
I was taken on and assigned to a gang of labor- 
ers, mostly Hungarians. But my chief asso- 
ciation of a week's stay there is with a board- 
ing-house, and especially its landlady. 

She was a girlish matron, with a face that 
made you thing of a child-wife, but she was a 
woman in capacity. Her baby was a year old, 
and generous Heaven was about to send an- 
other. Her boarders numbered seven when 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 9 

I was made welcome; and to help her in the 
care of a crippled husband and the child and 
guests, she had a little maid of about fifteen, 
while, to add to the income from our board, 
she took in all our washing, and did it herself 
with no outside help. She may have been 
twenty, but I should have guessed eighteen, 
and every man of us stood straight before her 
and did her bidding thankfully. 

It was a proud moment, and one which 
made me feel more nearly on equal terms with 
the other men, when one evening she came to 
me and, 

" John, you mind the baby this time while 
I finish getting supper/' she said, as she put 
the child in my arms. 

On the sofa in the sitting-room we would 
lay the little wide-eyed, sunny creature whom 
we rarely heard cry, and who never showed 
fear at the touch of our rough hands, nor at 
the thundering laughter that answered to her 
smiles and her gurgling attempts at speech. 

The mother waited at the table, and joined 
freely in our talk. She had a way of saying 
" By gosh ! " that fairly broke your heart, and 



10 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

at times she would stand still and swear softly, 
while her deep blue eyes widened in innocent 
surprise. 

They were haunting eyes, and they followed 
me far out on the rain-soaked roads of the 
valley of the Illinois. The walking was not 
bad at first. Over a rolling country the way 
wound past woodland and open fields, between 
banks of rank turf and wild flowers; and, but 
for the evident richness of soil, and the entire 
absence of rock, it might have been a New 
England valley with nothing to suggest the 
earlier monotony of undulating prairie. 

But the walking became steadily worse, 
until by nightfall each step was a painful 
pulling of a foot out of the mire then plant- 
ing it in the mire ahead, with Morris a good 
ten miles beyond. I was passing in the late 
twilight a farm-house that stood close to the 
road. In his shirt-sleeves, and seated in a 
tilted chair on the porch, was a young farmer 
with a group of lightly clad children about 
him. He accepted the explanation that I 
found the walking too heavy to admit of my 
reaching Morris that evening, and, readily giv- 



A DAY WITH A TEAMP 11 

ing me leave to sleep on his hay-mow, asked 
me in to have something to eat. 

I was struck at first sight with a marked 
resemblance in him to my friend Fitz- Adams, 
the manager of the logging camp in Penn- 
sylvania. All through our talk, while seated 
on the porch in the evening, there were re- 
minders in his manner and turns of speech 
and ways of looking at things of that very effi- 
cient boss. 

He was living in apparent poverty. The 
house was small and slightly built and meanly 
furnished. Indeed, there was an effect of 
squalor in its scant interior, and in the un- 
kempt appearance of his wife and children. 
But the man impressed you with the resolute 
reserve of one who bides his time and knows 
what he is about. It appeared in his evident 
contentment, joined with a certain hopeful- 
ness that was very engaging. It is true that 
the spring was wet, so wet that he had not yet 
been able to plant his corn, and it was growing 
late for planting, but, even if the crop should 
fail completely, he had much corn in the best 
condition, he said, left over from the uncom- 



12 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

monly large crop of the year before, which 
would be selling in the autumn at a better 
price. He was depressed by the persistent 
rains, but not discouraged, and, as for the 
region in which he had cast his lot, he clearly 
thought it one of the best for a man beginning 
the world as a farmer. With land at fifty 
dollars an acre, there was a good market near 
at hand, and money on the security of the land 
could be had at five per cent. It was best to 
buy, he said. Four thousand dollars would 
secure a farm of eighty acres, and two hundred 
dollars would pay the interest, whereas the 
rental might reach three hundred or even three 
hundred and fifty. Unmistakably he was 
poor, but he was certainly not of the complain- 
ing sort, and I thought that it did not require 
a long look into the future to see him in full 
possession of the land and the owner of a more 
comfortable home besides. 

"When the barn-yard fowls wakened me in 
the morning the sun was rising to a cloudless 
dawn. But, by the time that I took to the 
road, all the sky was overcast again, and prog- 
ress was as difficult as on the night before. 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 13 

The stoneless soil was saturated, until it could 
absorb not another drop, and water formed a 
pool in every foot-print and ran in muddy 
streams in the wheel-tracks. 

Two miles down the road was a railway. I 
reached it after an hour's hard walk and fol- 
lowed it to the tow-path of a canal, which 
afforded comparatively firm footing over the 
remaining eight miles into Morris. It was 
now ten o'clock, and for the past hour a steady 
drizzle had been falling, which increased to a 
down-pour as I entered the town. There I 
remained sheltered until nearly noon, when 
the rain ceased and I renewed the journey. 
The roads I knew by experience to be almost 
impassable, so I found the line of the Rock 
Island Railway and started west in the hope 
of reaching Ottawa by night. 

Dense clouds lay heavily upon the fields that 
stood, many of them, deep in water. The 
moist air was hot and sluggish, but under foot 
was the hard road-bed, and the course was the 
straightest that could be cut to the Mississippi. 
The line was a double one, and the gutter 
between formed a good cinder-track, so that I 



14 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

had not to measure the distance from sleeper 
to sleeper at every step, which grows to be a 
horrible monotony. 

I had cleared the town by two miles or more 
and was settling to the swing of a long walk 
when I saw, not far ahead, a gang of navvies 
at work; almost at the same moment there ap- 
peared, emerging from the fog beyond, the 
figure of a man. We were about equally dis- 
tant from the gang, and I had passed the 
workmen only a few yards when we met. 
The impression grew as he drew near that here 
was a typical tramp, and, being unaccustomed 
to his order and its ways, I wondered how we 
should fare, if thrown together. But if I rec- 
ognized him as a tramp, he had done as much 
by me; for, when we met, he hailed me as a 
confrere with, 

" Hello, partner! which way? " 

" Fm going to Ottawa," I said. 

" How long will you hold Ottaway down? " 
he asked. 

" Oh, I'm only passing through on my way 
to Davenport." 

That was enough for Farrell as evidence of 



A DAY WITH A TEAMP 15 

my being a hobo, However raw a recruit; but 
there was a certain courtesy of the road which 
he wished to maintain, if he could, in the face 
of my awkward ignorance. I was conscious 
of an embarrassment which I could not under- 
stand. 

" How far is it to Morris? " he asked next, 
and the opening should have been enough for 
any man, but I answered dully, with painful 
accuracy as to the distance that I had come. 

Clearly nothing would penetrate such dens- 
ity but the frankest directness, so out he 
blurted: 

" Well, partner, if you don't mind, I'll go 
with you." 

Light dawned upon me then, and I tried to 
make up in cordiality for a want of intuition. 
Embarrassment was gone at once, and with an 
ease, as of long acquaintance, Farrell began to 
tell me how that, on the day before, he had 
lost his partner and for twenty-four hours had 
been alone. The loneliness was a horror to 
him, from which he shrunk, even in the tell- 
ing, and he expanded, in the companionship of 
a total stranger, like a flower in light and 
warmth. 



16 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

Without a moment's hesitation he aban- 
doned the way toward Morris and turned back 
upon his former course, with a light-hearted- 
ness at having a partner that was highly flat- 
tering. 

Here certainly was life reduced to simple 
terms. As we stood at meeting on the railway 
line, Farrell was as though he had no single 
human tie with a strong hold upon him. The 
clothes that covered him were his only posses- 
sions, and a toss of a coin might well determine 
toward which point of the compass he would 
go. The casual meeting with a new acquain- 
tance was enough to give direction to an im- 
mediate plan and to change the face of nature. 

There was trouble in his blue eyes when we 
met, the fluttering, anxious bewilderment that 
one sees in the eyes of a half -frightened child. 
It was an appeal for relief from intolerable 
loneliness; all his face brightened when we set 
off together. He had the natural erectness of 
carriage which gives a distinction of its own, 
and, apart from a small, weak mouth, slightly 
tobacco-stained, and an ill-defined chin, he was 
good to look at, with his straight nose and well 






A DAY WITH A TRAMP 17 

set eyes and generous breadth of forehead, the 
thick brown hair turning gray about it and 
adding to his looks a good ten years above his 
actual two-and-twenty. A faded coat was 
upon his arm and he wore a flannel shirt that 
had once been navy blue, and ragged trousers, 
and a pair of boots, through rents in which his 
bare feet appeared. A needle was stuck 
through the front of his shirt, and the soiled 
white cotton with which it was threaded was 
wound around the cloth within the projecting 
ends. 

However accustomed to " beating his way," 
instead of going on foot, Farrell may have 
been, he was a good walker. Stretching far 
ahead was the level reach of the road-bed, with 
the converging lines of rails disappearing in 
the mist. Our muscles relaxed in the hot, 
unmoving air, until we struck the gait which 
becomes a mechanical swing with scarcely a 
sense of effort. Then Farrell was at his best. 
Snatches of strange song fell from him and 
remembered fragments of stage dialogue with 
little meaning and with no connection, but all 
expressing his care-free mood. It was con- 



18 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

tagious. Oh, but the world was wide and fair, 
and we were young and free, and vagabond 
and unashamed! Walt Whitman was our 
poet then, but I did not tell Farrell so ; for the 
new, raw wine of life was in his veins, and he 
sang a song of his own. 

A breeze sprang up from the west, and the 
heavy mists began to move, but from out the 
east great banks of clouds rose higher with the 
sound of distant thunder, which drew nearer, 
until spattering raindrops fell, fairly hissing 
on the hot rails. No shelter was at hand; 
when the storm broke it came with vindictive 
fury and drenched us in a few moments. We 
walked on with many looks behind to make 
sure of not being run down, for we could 
scarcely have heard the approach of a train 
in the almost unbroken peals of thunder that 
nearly drowned our shouts. Then the shower 
passed; the thunder grew distant and faint 
again, and from a clear sky the sun shone upon 
us with blistering heat, through air as still and 
heavy and as surcharged with electricity as 
before the storm. 

Farrell had been quite indifferent to the 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 19 

rain, accepting it with a philosophic unconcern 
that was perfect. There was certainly little 
cause to complain, for in half an hour our 
clothing was dry; meantime the expression of 
his mood was changed. He had been friendly 
before, but impersonal; now he wished to get 
into closer touch. 

" Where are you from, partner? " he asked. 

" I worked last winter in Chicago/' I said. 

"What at?" 

" Trucking in a factory for awhile, then 
with a road-gang on the Fair Grounds. I had 
a job in Joliet, but I quit in a week," I con- 
cluded. I was short, for I knew that this was 
merely introductory, and that Farrell was 
fencing for an opening. 

" I've been on the road seven weeks now, 
looking for a job, and, in that time, I ain't 
slept but two nights in a bed," he began. 

" Two nights in a bed out of forty-nine? " 
I asked. 

" Yes. In that time I've beat my way out 
to Omaha and back to Lima and up and down; 
and one night a farmer near Tiffin, Ohio, give 
me a supper and let me sleep in a bed in his 



20 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

wagon-house, and one wet night in Chicago I 
had the price of a hunk in me jeans, and I says 
to meself, says I, ' I'd sooner sleep dry to-night 
than get drunk.' " 

It came then of itself, needing only an occa- 
sional prompting question, and the narrative 
was essentially true, I fancy; for, free from 
embellishment, it moved with the directness of 
reality. 

Born in Wisconsin of parents who had emi- 
grated from Ireland, Farrell was bred in an 
Illinois village, about fifty miles north of 
where we were walking at the time. His two 
sisters lived there still, he thought, but his 
mother had died when he was but a lad. His 
father was a day laborer at work in Peoria, so 
far as Farrell knew. He had not seen him for 
many years, and he kept up no contact with 
his people. 

Much the most interesting part of the story 
to me was that which related to the past year. 
Farrell was twenty-two; he had grown up he 
hardly knew how, and was already a confirmed 
roadster, with an inordinate love for tobacco, 
and a well-developed taste for drink. 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 21 

In the early summer he had drifted into 
Ottawa, the very town that we were nearing, 
and, being momentarily tired of the road, he 
sought and found a job in a tile factory. At 
this point his narrative grew deeply absorbing, 
because of the unconscious art of it in its sim- 
ple adherence to life; but being unable to 
reproduce his words, I can only suggest their 
import. 

It was a crisis in his history. The change 
began with an experience of a mechanics , 
boarding-house. He was a vagabond by 
breeding, with no clearly defined ideas beyond 
food and drink, and immunity from work. He 
was awaking to manhood, and there began to 
dawn for him at the boarding-house a sense of 
home, and of something more in the motherly 
care of the housekeeper. 

" Say, she was good to me," was his own 
expression, " she done me proud. She used to 
mend me clothes, and if I got drunk, she never 
chewed the rag, but I see it cut her bad, and I 
swore off for good ; and then I used to give her 
me wages to keep for me, and she'd allow me 
fifty cents a week above me board." 



22 A DAT WITH A TRAMP 

The picture went on unfolding itself nat- 
urally in the portrayal of interests undreamed 
of beyond idleness, and enough of plug and 
beer. The savings grew to a little store; then 
there came the suggestion of a new suit of 
clothes, and a hat and boots, and a boiled shirt 
and collar, and a bright cravat. Farrell little 
thought of the native touch of art in his de- 
scription of how, when all these were pro- 
cured, he would fare forth on a Sunday morn- 
ing, not merely another man, but other than 
anything that he had imagined. A sense of 
achievement came and brought a dawning 
feeling of obligation, and a desire to take 
standing with other men, and to know some- 
thing and to bear a part in the work of a 
citizen of the town. 

Some glimmer had remained to him of re- 
ligious teaching before his mother died, and, 
in the conscious virtue of new dress, he sought 
out the church, and began to go regularly to 
mass. 

I knew what was coming then; there had 
been an inevitableness that foretold it in the 
tale, and I found myself breathing more freely 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 23 

when he began to speak without self -conscious- 
ness of the girl. 

He said very little of her, but it was not at 
all difficult to catch the ampler meaning of his 
words. Sunday began to hold a new interest, 
quite apart from Sunday clothes. He found 
himself looking forward through the week to 
a glimpse of her at church, but the week was 
far too long, and in the autumn evenings he 
would dress himself in his best, regardless of 
the jeers of the other men, and would walk 
past her father's corner grocery. Sometimes 
he saw her on the pavement in front of the 
shop, or helping her father to wait on custom- 
ers within. 

All this was very disturbing; a new world 
had opened to him with a steady job. It was 
unfolding itself with quite wonderful revela- 
tions in the home-life of his boarding-house, 
and the friendship of the matron, and the com- 
panionship of other workingmen, and the re- 
sponsibility which was beginning to replace his 
former recklessness. Moreover, he was get- 
ting on in the tile factory. He was strong 
and active, and the chances of being trans- 



24 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

ferred to piece-work was a spur to do his best 
at his present unskilled labor. Utterly un- 
foreseen in its train of consequences had come 
into this budding consciousness, the vision of a 
girl. He had merely seen her at church, then 
seen her again, then found himself looking 
forward to sight of her, and unable to wait pa- 
tiently for Sunday. The very thought of her 
carried with it a feeling of contempt for his 
former life, and a distressing sense of differ- 
ence in their present stations, which developed, 
sometimes, into the temptation to go back to 
the road and forget. That was the tempta- 
tion that was always in the background, and 
always coining to the fore when the craving 
for drink was strongest, or when the monotony 
of ten hours' daily labor grew more than com- 
monly burdensome. For four months and 
more he had resisted now, and, as a reward, he 
had become just man enough to know feebly 
that he could not easily forget, even on the 
road. * 

How he plucked up courage to meet her I 
do not know, for he did not tell me, and not 
for treasure would I have asked him at this 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 25 

point of the story. He did meet her, how- 
ever, and the wonder of it was upon him still, 
as he told me modestly, in quaint speech, that 
she smiled upon him. 

Oh, ineffable mystery of life, that he, a hobo 
of a few months before, should be reading now 
in a good girl's eyes an answering liking to his 
own ! He was little more than a lad, and she 
but a slip of a girl, and I do not know what 
it may have meant to her, but to him it was 
life from the dead. Very swiftly the winter 
sped and very hard he worked until he earned 
a job at piecework in the factory, and then 
harder than ever until he was making good 
wages. He could see little of her, for she had 
an instinctive knowledge of her father's prob- 
able displeasure, but there grew up a tacit 
understanding between them that kept his 
hope and ambition fired. 

Nothing in experience could have been more 
wonderful than those winter months, when he 
felt himself getting a man's grip of things 
unutterable, that came as from out a boundless 
sea into the range of his strange awakening. 
And this new life was centred in her, as 



26 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

though she were its source. He lived for her, 
and worked and thought for her and tried to be 
worthy of her, and between his former and his 
present life was a gulf which by some miracle 
she had created. 

It came upon him with the suddenness of 
a pistol-shot one evening late in March when 
they stood talking for a moment before say- 
ing good-night at her father's door. Thunder- 
ing down the steps from the living rooms over 
the shop rushed the grocer, a large, florid Irish- 
man. In a moment he was upon them, hot in 
the newly acquired knowledge that Farrell was 
" keeping steady company " with his daugh- 
ter. His ire was up, and his Irish tongue was 
loosed, and Farrell got the sting of it. It 
lashed him for a beggarly factory laborer of 
doubtful birth, and, gaining vehemence, it 
lashed him for a hobo predestined to destruc- 
tion, and finally, with strong admonition, it 
charged him never to speak to the girl and 
never to enter her home again. 

If only he could have known, if only there 
had been a voice to tell him convincingly that 
now there had come a crucial test in his life 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 27 

between character and circumstance, a voice 
" to lift him through the fight " ! But all his 
past was against him. In another hour he was 
dead drunk and he went drunk to work in the 
morning, and was discharged. 

The pleading of his landlady was of no 
avail. He thought that he had lost the girl. 
Nothing remained but the road, and back to 
the road he would go, and soon, with his sav- 
ings in his pocket, he was " beating his way " 
to Chicago. There he could live on beer and 
free lunches, and, at dives and brothels, he 
would " blow in " the savings of ten months 
and try to forget how sacred the sum had 
seemed to him, when, little by little, he added 
to it, while planning for the future. Its very 
sacredness gave a hellish zest to utter aban- 
donment to vice while the money lasted ; then 
he took again to begging on the streets with 
" a hard-luck story/' until, in the warm April 
days, he felt the old drawing to the open coun- 
try and began once more to " beat his way " up 
and down the familiar railway lines and to beg 
his bread from the kind-hearted folk, who, in 
feeding him, were fast completing his ruin. 



28 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

We were entering Seneca now, and another 
thunder-storm was upon us, but, as it broke in 
a deluge of rain, we ran for shelter under the 
eaves of the railway station. A west-bound 
passenger-train drew in as we stood there. 

" That's the way to travel," I heard Farrell 
say, half to himself. It was the sheltered com- 
fort of the passengers that he envied, I sup- 
posed. But not at all. 

" See that hobo?" he continued, and, fol- 
lowing the line of his outstretched finger, I saw 
a ragged wretch dripping like a drowned rat 
as he walked slowly up and down beside the 
panting locomotive. 

" Yes," I answered. 

" The train's got a blind baggage-car on," 
he continued. " That's a car that ain't got 
no door in the end that's next the engine. 
You can get on the front platform when the 
train starts, and the brakemen can't reach you 
till she stops, but then you're off before they 
are and on again when she starts up. The 
fireman can reach you all right, and if he's 
ugly, he'll heave coal at you, and sometimes 
he'll kick you off when the train's going full 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 29 

speed; but generally lie lets you be. That 
hobo come in two hours from Chicago and 
he's got a snap for as long as he wants to 
ride," he concluded. 

Nevertheless, I was glad to see the train go 
without Farrell's saying anything about join- 
ing our adventurous brother on the fore-plat- 
form of the " blind baggage-car." 

In the seething sunlight that followed the 
storm we left the station and walked along the 
village street which lay parallel with the rail- 
way. At a mineral spring we stopped to 
drink, while a group of school-children who 
were loitering homeward stood watching us, 
the fascination in their eyes which all children 
feel in the mystery which surrounds the lives 
of vagabonds and gypsies. 

On the outskirts of the village, when we 
were about to resume the railway, Farrell sug- 
gested that he should go foraging. He was 
hungry, for he had eaten nothing since early 
morning, while I had bought food at Morris. 
I promised to wait for him and very gladly sat 
down on the curbstone in the shade. 

Two bare-foot urchins, their trousers rolled 



30 A BAY WITH A TRAMP 

up to their knees, who had evidently been 
watching us from behind a picket-fence, stole 
stealthily out of the gate when Farrell turned 
the corner. Creeping as near as they dared, 
they gathered a handful of small, sun-baked 
clods and began to throw them at me as a 
target. It was rare sport for a time, but I was 
beyond their range and much absorbed in Far- 
rell's story. Disappointed at not having the 
excitement of being chased back to the shelter 
of their yard, they gave up the game and seated 
themselves on the curb, with their naked, 
brown feet bathed in the pool which had 
formed in the gutter. I had become quite un- 
conscious of them, when I suddenly realized 
that they were in warm discussion. It was 
about me, I found, for I heard one of them 
raise his voice in stern insistence. 

" ISTaw," he said, " that ain't the same bum, 
that's another bum! " 

Farrell returned empty-handed and a trifle 
dejected, I thought. His mind was evidently 
on food. A little farther down the line he 
pointed out a farm-house to the right and sug- 
gested our trying there. Along the edge of a 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 31 

soft meadow, where the damp grass stood high, 
nearly ready for mowing, we walked to a 
muddy lane which led to the barn-yard. A 
lank youth in overalls tucked into top-boots 
and a gingham shirt and a wide-brimmed straw 
hat stood in the open doorway of the barn, 
calmly staring at us as we approached. 

Farrell greeted him familiarly and was an- 
swered civilly. Then, without further parley, 
he explained that we were come for something 
to eat. 

" Go up to the house and ask the boss," said 
the hired man. 

The farmer was plainly well-to-do. His 
house was a large, square, white-painted, 
wooden structure topped with a cupola, and 
with well-kept grounds about it, while the 
farm buildings wore a prosperous air of pleni- 
tude. Just then a well-grown watch-dog of 
the collie type came walking toward us across 
the lawn, a menacing inquiry in his face. 

" Won't you go? " suggested Farrell. 

The hired man had caught sight of the dog, 
and there was a twinkle in his eye as he an- 
swered, airily, 



32 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

" Oh, no, thank you." 

" Does the dog bite?" Farrell ventured, 
cautiously. 

" Yes," came sententiously from the hired 
man. 

" We'd better get back to the road," Farrell 
said to me, and we could feel amused eyes upon 
us as we retraced our steps to the track. 

Once more Farrell tried his luck; this time 
at a meagre, wooden, drab cottage that faced a 
country lane, a hundred yards from the rail- 
way. I watched him from the line and noticed 
that he talked for some time with the woman 
who answered his knock and stood framed in 
the door. 

When he returned he had two large slices 
of bread in his hand and some cold meat. 

" I didn't like to take it," he remarked. 
" Her husband's a carpenter and ain't had no 
work for six weeks. But she says she couldn't 
have me go away hungry. That's the kind 
that always helps you, the kind that's in hard 
luck themselves, and knows what it is." 

He was for sharing the forage and, hungry 
as he was, he had not eaten a morsel of it when 



A DAY WITH A TEAMP 33 

he rejoined me. That I would take none 
seemed to him at first a personal slight, but he 
understood it better when I explained that I 
had had food at Morris. 

There was a cloudless sunset that evening, 
the sun sinking in a crimson glow that foretold 
another day of great heat. The stars came 
slowly out over a firmament of slaty blue, and 
shone obscurely through the humid air. Far- 
rell and I were silent for some time. Both of 
us had walked about thirty-six miles that day, 
and were intent on a resting-place. At last 
we began to catch the glitter of street-lights in 
Ottawa, and, at sight of them, Farrell's spirits 
rose. He was like one returning home after 
long absence. The sound of a church-bell 
came faintly to us. Farrell held me by the 
arm. 

" You hear that? " he asked. 

" Yes." 

" That's the Methodist church bell." 

I could see his face light up, as though 
something were rousing the best that was in 
him. 

At the eastern end of the town, and close to 



34 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

the railway, we came upon a brick-kiln. Far- 
rell was perfectly familiar with, his surround- 
ings now, and we stopped for a drink. For 
some reason the water would not run in the 
faucet, so we went around to a barn-like build- 
ing in the rear. Through a large, open door- 
way he entered, while I remained outside. 
Soon I heard him in conversation with some- 
one, who proved to be the night-watchman, 
and, finding that Farrell was not likely to re- 
join me soon, I also entered. 

Some moments were necessary to accustom 
one's eyes to the interior, but I could see at 
once the figure of a white-bearded old man 
lying at full length on a bed of gunny-sacks 
thrown over some sloping boards. His head 
was propped up, and he held a newspaper 
which he had been reading by the light of two 
large torches that hung suspended near him, 
and from which columns of black smoke rose, 
curling upward into dark recesses among the 
rafters. Everything was black with smut and 
grimy dust. Soon I could see that on one side 
were great heaps of coal that sloped away to 
the outer walls like the talus against a cliff. 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 35 

Farrell was seated on a coal-heap, and was 
absorbed in the news of the town, as he gath- 
ered it from the old man. Quite unnoticed, I 
sat down on a convenient board and listened 
dreamily, hoping heartily the while that we 
should not have to go much further that night. 

Presently I found myself alert to what was 
being said, for they were discussing the ques- 
tion of a night's lodging. It was from the 
watchman that the suggestion came that we 
should remain where we were, and very readily 
we agreed. Taking a torch from its socket, 
he lighted us through a long passage to an- 
other room that was used as a carpenter's shop. 
A carpenter's bench ran the length of it, and 
the tools lay strewn over its surface. From 
a corner he drew a few yards of old matting, 
which he offered to Farrell as a bed; and he 
found a door off its hinges, which, when 
propped up at one end as it lay on the floor, 
made what proved that night a comfortable 
bed for me. With a promise to call us early, 
he left us in the dark, and, quickly off with our 
boots, we wrapped ourselves in our coats and 
were soon fast asleep. 



36 A DAY WITH A TEAMP 

The watchman was true to his word ; for the 
stars were still shining when Farrell and I, 
hungry and stiff, set off down the track in the 
direction of the railway station. His mood 
was that of the evening before, as though, 
after long wandering, he was returning to 
his native place. Recollections of those ten 
months of sober industry crowded painfully 
upon him, and he shrunk like a culprit from 
possible recognition. Yet every familiar sight 
held a fascination for him. With kindling in- 
terest he pointed out the locality of the board- 
ing-house, and again held me by the arm and 
made me listen, until I, too, could catch the 
sound of escaping steam at the tile factory 
where he had worked. 

The iron was entering into his soul, but he 
knew it only as a painful struggle between a 
desire to return to a life of work and the inertia 
that would keep him on the road. We walked 
on, in silence for the most part, under the 
morning stars that were dimming at the ap- 
proach of day. When Farrell spoke, it was to 
reveal, unconsciously, the progress of the 
struggle within him. 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 37 

" It ain't no use tryin' for a job; I've been 
lookin' seven weeks now." That was the lie 
to smooth the road to vagabondage. 

" I'd have a hell of a time to get square in 
this town again. Everybody that knowed me, 
knowed I got fired for drinkin'." That was 
the truth that made strait the gate and nar- 
row the way that led to life. 

In a moment of encouragement he spoke of 
the boarding-house keeper and of her promise 
to take him back again, if he would return to 
work; but his thoughts of the girl he kept to 
himself, and deeply I liked him for it. 

"We were leaving Ottawa behind. With a 
sharp curve the railway swept around the base 
of bluffs that rose sheer on our right from the 
roadbed, rugged and grim in the twilight, the 
trees on top darkly outlined against the sky. 
At our left were the flooded lowlands of the 
Illinois bottom. We could see the decaying 
cornstalks of last year's growth just appearing 
above the water in the submerged fields, and, 
here and there, a floating out-building which 
had been carried down by the flood and was 
caught among the trees. 



d8 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

Was he man enough to hold fast to his 
chance, or would he allow himself to drift? 
This was the drama that was unfolding itself 
there in the dark before the dawn, under 
frowning banks beside a flooded river, while 
the silent stars looked down. 

We came to another brick-kiln, with its 
buildings on the bank just above the rail- 
way. A light was shining from a shanty 
window, and a well-worn foot-path led from 
the road up through the underbrush of the 
hillside to the shanty door. A night-watch- 
man was making a final round of the kiln 
to see that all was right before the day's 
work began. 

Farrell stood still for a moment, the strug- 
gle fierce within him. 

" Let's get a drink of water," he said. 

The night-watchman led us to a spring and 
answered, encouragingly, Farrell's inquiry 
about a possible job. 

" Go up and ask the boss," he said. " He's 
just finished his breakfast. That's his house," 
he added, pointing to the shanty with the 
light in the window. 



A DAY WITH A TRAMP 39 

From the foot of the path I watched Farrell 
climb to the shanty door and knock. The 
door opened and the voices of two men came 
faintly down to me. My hopes rose, for 
it was not merely a question and a decisive 
reply, but the give and take of continued dia- 
logue. The suspense had grown to physical 
suffering, when I saw Farrell turn from the 
door and begin to descend the path. 

I could not see his face distinctly; but, as 
he drew nearer, I caught its expression of dis- 
tress. The half -frightened, worried bewilder- 
ment that I had noticed on the day before 
was back in his eyes, as he stood looking 
into mine, evidently expecting me to speak. 
I remained silent. 

" I've got a job," he said, presently, and I 
could have struck him for the joy of it. 

" Me troubles is just begun, for the whole 
town knows me for a bum," he added, while 
his anxious eyes moved restlessly behind frown- 
ing brows. I said nothing, but waited until I 
could catch his eye at rest. Then out it came, 
a little painfully : 

" I'll go to the boarding-house to-night, 



40 A DAY WITH A TRAMP 

when me day's work is done, and put up 
there, if the missus can take me." 

" Good/' I said, and I waited again until 
his gaze was steady upon me. 

For a day we had tramped together, and 
slept together for a night, and, quite of his 
own accord, he had given me his confidence. 
We were parting, now that he had found work, 
and I hoped that I might receive the final 
mark of his trust, so I waited. 

He read my question, and his eyes wan- 
dered, but they came back to mine, and he 
spoke up like a man: 

" I can't, till I'm a bit decent again and got 
some clothes; but I'll hold down me job, and, 
as soon as I can, I'll go back to her." 

A warning whistle blew; Farrell went up 
the path to take his place in the brick-kiln, and 
I was soon far down the line in the direction of 
Utica. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 

SCAKCELY a generalization with the 
least claim to value can be drawn from 
my superficial contact with the world of 
manual labor in America. If there is one, 
it is, that a man who is able and willing to 
work can find employment in this country if 
he will go out in real search for it. It may not 
be well paid, but it need not be dishonest, and 
it is difficult to conceive of its failing to afford 
opportunities of making a way to improved 
position. 

And yet, one has no sooner made such a 
statement than it becomes necessary to qualify 
it. Suppose that the worker, able and will- 
ing to work, is unemployed in a congested 
labor market, where the supply far exceeds 
the demand, and suppose that he must remain 
with his wife and children, since he cannot 

desert them and has no means of taking them 
43 



44 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

away. Or imagine him newly landed, thrown 
upon the streets by an emigrant agency, igno- 
rant of the language and of our methods of 
work, and especially ignorant of the country 
itself. To the number of like suppositions 
there is no end. Actual experience, however, 
serves to focus the situation. I have stood be- 
side men whom I knew, and have seen them 
miss the chance of employment because they 
were so far weakened by the strain of the 
sweating system that they were incapable of 
the strain of hard manual labor. 

Even at the best, much of the real difficulty 
is often the subjective one summed up in the 
sentence of a man who has wide knowledge of 
wage-earners in America, to whom I once 
spoke of the surprising ease with which I 
found employment everywhere, except in 
larger towns. 

" Oh, yes," he replied; " but you forget how 
little gifted with imagination the people are 
who commonly form by far the greater num- 
ber of the unemployed." 

It merely serves to show again the futility 
of generalizing about labor, as though it were 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 45 

a commodity like any other, sensitive to the 
play of the law of supply and demand, while 
supported by a thorough knowledge of mar- 
kets and the means of reaching quickly those 
that, for the time, are the most favorable. 

The mass which men speak casually of as 
" labor " is an aggregation of individuals, 
each with his human ties and prejudices 
and his congenital weaknesses and strength, 
and each with his own salvation to work 
out through difficulties without and within 
that are little understood from the outside. 
You may enter his world and share his life, 
however rigid, sustained by the knowledge 
that at any moment you may leave it, and 
your experience, although the nearest ap- 
proach that you can make, is yet removed 
almost by infinity from that of the man at 
your side, who was born to manual labor 
and bred to it, and whose whole life, physi- 
cal and mental, has been moulded by its 
hard realities. 

It would be quite true to say that " the prob- 
lem of the unemployed in America is a prob- 
lem of the distribution of workers/ ' taking 



46 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

them from regions where many men are look- 
ing for a job, to other regions, where many 
jobs are looking for a man. But it would be 
a shallow truth, with little insight into the 
real condition of multitudes, whose life-strug- 
gle is for day's bread and in whom the gre- 
garious instinct is an irresistible gravitation. 
It is not difficult to show that congestion in an 
industrial centre, with its accompanying mis- 
ery, might be relieved by an exodus to coun- 
try districts, where an unsatisfied demand for 
hands is chronic. But the human adjustments 
involved in the change would be beyond all 
calculation; and, even were they effected, it 
would be not a little disturbing in the end to 
find large numbers returning to the town, 
frankly preferring want with companionship 
and a sense of being in touch with their time 
to the comparative plenty and, with it, the 
loneliness and isolation of country living. A 
part of the penalty that one pays for attempt- 
ing to deal with elements so fascinating as 
those of human nature is in their very incal- 
culability, in the elusive charm of men who 
develop the best that is in them in spite of cir- 



WITH IOWA FAKMERS 47 

cumstances the most adverse, and in an evasive 

quality in others who sometimes fail to respond 

to the best devised plans for their betterment. 

But human nature never loses its interest, and, 

as earnest of a good time coming, there are 

always men in every generation who, through 

unselfish service of their fellows, have won 

The faith that meets 
Ten thousand cheats, 
Yet drops no jot of faith. 

However little the fact may have applied to 
the actual " problem of the unemployed," it 
nevertheless was true, as shown in my own ex- 
perience, that there was a striking contrast 
throughout the country between a struggle 
among men for employment and a struggle 
among employers for men. 

Early in the journey I began to note that 
every near approach to a considerable centre of 
population was immediately apparent in an 
increasing difficulty in finding work. I had 
never a long search in the country or in coun- 
try villages, and I soon learned to avoid cities, 
unless I was bent upon another errand than 
that of employment. 



48 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

I could easily have escaped Chicago and its 
crowded labor market. Offers of places in the 
late autumn as general utility man on farms in 
northern Ohio and Indiana were plentiful as 
I passed, and I well knew, during a fortnight's 
fruitless search for work in Chicago in early 
winter, that at any time a day's march from 
the city, or two days' march at most, would 
take me to regions where the difficulty would 
quickly disappear. The temptation to quit 
the experiment altogether, or, at least, to go 
out to the more hospitable country, was then 
strong at times; but I could but realize that, 
in yielding, I should be abandoning a very 
real phase of the experience of unskilled labor, 
that of unemployment, and that I should miss 
the chance of some contact with bodies of or- 
ganized skilled workmen as well as with the 
revolutionaries who can be easiest found in 
our larger towns. So I remained, and for two 
weeks I saw and, in an artificial way, I felt 
something of the grim horror of being penni- 
less on the streets of a city in winter, quite able 
and most willing to work, yet unable to find 
any steady employment. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 49 

With the return of spring I went into the 
country again, drifting on with no more defi- 
nite plan than that of going westward until I 
should reach the Pacific ; and here at once was 
the contrast. Opportunities of work every- 
where; with farmers, when one was on the 
country roads ; in brick-kilns, when bad walk- 
ing drove one to the railway lines. 

Farrell, a fellow-tramp for a day on the 
Eock Island Railway in Illinois, had, for seven 
weeks, been looking for work from Omaha to 
Lima and back again, he told me, and yet he 
got a job near Ottawa in response to his first 
inquiry; while a few miles farther down the 
line I, too, was offered work in a brick-kiln at 
Utica. I did not accept it, only because I 
had savings enough from my last job to see me 
through to Davenport. 

It was on the afternoon of Saturday, June 
4, 1892, that I reached Davenport. I had 
followed the line of the Rock Island Railway 
from Morris, sleeping in brick-kilns, and, one 
night, at Bureau Junction, in a shed by the 
village church, and I was a bit fagged. I had 
developed a plan to go to Minneapolis. I 



50 WITH IOWA FAKMERS 

hoped to work the passage as a hand on a river 
boat. 

At the open door of a livery-stable I stopped 
to ask the way to the office of the steamboat 
line, attracted, no doubt, by the look of a man 
who sat just inside. With a kindly face of 
German type, he was of middle age, a little 
stout, dressed in what is known as a " business 
suit," and when he spoke, it was with a trace 
of German accent. 

Mr. Ross is a sufficiently near approach to 
his name. He was not an Iowa farmer, but 
he was my first acquaintance in Iowa, and he 
had things to say about the unemployed. A 
director in a bank and the owner of a livery- 
stable, he was owner of I know not what be- 
sides, but I know that he was delightfully cor- 
dial, and that his hospitality was of a kind to 
do credit to the best traditions of the West. 

He answered my question obligingly, then 
asked me whether I was looking for a job. 

" For if you are," he added, " there's one 
right here," and he waved his hand expres- 
sively in the direction of the stalls at the rear. 

This was more than I had bargained for; 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 51 

it was wholly new to my experience to find 
work in a town before I even asked for it. 

I told him frankly that I was ont of employ- 
ment and that I must find some soon, but that 
there were reasons, at the moment, why I 
wished to reached Minneapolis as early as pos- 
sible. 

Being without the smallest gift of mimicry 
I could not disguise my tongue, and it had 
been a satisfaction from the first to find that 
this lack in no way hampered me. I was ac- 
cepted readily enough as a working-man by 
my fellows, and my greenness and manner of 
speech, I had every reason to think, were 
credited to my being an immigrant of a new 
and hitherto unknown sort. 

" Wnat's your trade? " the men with whom 
I worked would generally ask me, supposing 
that clumsiness as a day laborer was accounted 
for by my having been trained to the manual 
skill of a handicraft. 

"What country are you from?" they in- 
quired, and when I said " Black Rock," which 
is the point in Connecticut from which I set 
out, I have no doubt that there came to their 



52 WITH IOWA FAEMERS 

minds visions of an island in distant seas, 
where any manner of strange artisan might be 
bred. 

What they thought was of little conse- 
quence; that they were willing to receive me 
with naturalness to their companionship as a 
fellow-workman was of first importance to me, 
and this was an experience that never failed. 

At last I was west of the Mississippi, and, 
that I might pass as a man of education in the 
dress of a laborer, was a matter of no note, 
since men of education in the ranks of work- 
men have not been uncommon there. 

It was plainly from this point of view that 
Mr. Ross was talking to me. If I was an edu- 
cated man, it was my own affair. That for a 
time, at least, I had been living by day's labor 
was evident from my dress, and it was not un- 
likely that I was looking for a job. Happen- 
ing to have a vacant place in the stable, he 
offered it to me, and, being interested in what 
I had to say, he led me to speak on of work 
during the past winter in Chicago, and my 
slight association there with the unemployed 
and with men of revolutionary ideas. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 53 

Before I knew it, we were drifting far down 
a stream of talk, and time was flying. Six 
months' living in close intimacy with what is 
saddest and often cruelest, in the complex in- 
dustrialism of a great city had produced a de- 
pression, which I had not shaken off in three 
weeks' sojourn in the wholesome country. I 
was steeped in the views of men who told me 
that things could never grow better until they 
had grown so much worse that society would 
either perish or be reorganized. The needed 
change was not in men, they agreed, but in 
social conditions ; and from every phase of So- 
cialism and Anarchy, I had heard the propa- 
ganda of widely varying changes, all alike, 
however, prophesying a regenerated society, 
the vision of which alone remained the hope 
and faith of many lives. 

The pent-up feelings of six months found a 
sympathetic response in Mr. Ross ; the more so 
as I discovered in him a wholly different point 
of view. He had no quarrel with conditions 
in America. As a lad of fourteen he came 
from Germany and, having begun life here 
without friends or help of any kind, he was 



54 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

now, after years of work and thrift, a man with 
some property and with many ties, not the least 
of which was a love for the country which had 
given him so good a chance. 

The mere suggestion of a programme of 
radical change roused him. He began some- 
what vehemently to denounce a class of men, 
foreigners, many of them, strangers to our in- 
stitutions, irresponsible for the most part, who 
bring with them from abroad revolutionary 
ideas which they spread, while enjoying the 
liberities and advantages of the nation that 
they try to harm. 

" Why don't they stay in their own coun- 
tries and ( reform ' them? " he added. 
" Thousands of men who have come here from 
the Old World have raised themselves to posi- 
tions of honor and independence and wealth as 
they never could have done in their native 
lands. And yet these disturbers would upset 
it all, a system that for a hundred years and 
more we have tried and found not wanting. 

" I am interested in a local bank," he con- 
tinued. " The management has been suc- 
cessful ; the directors are capable men, and the 
investments pay a fair dividend. Now sup- 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 55 

pose someone, the least responsible person in 
the corporation, were to come forward with a 
new, untried system of banking and should 
insist upon its adoption and even threaten the 
existence of the bank if his plan should be 
rejected. That would be a case like this of 
your Socialist and Anarchist." 

He was a little heated, but he caught him- 
self with a laugh and was smiling genially as 
he added: 

" I see your c unemployed ' friends often. 
Scarcely a day passes that men don't come in 
here asking for a job. My experience is that 
if they were half as much in earnest in look- 
ing for work as I am in looking for men that 
can work, they wouldn't search far or long. 
I've tried a good many of them in my time. I 
can tell now in five minutes whether a man 
has any real work in him; and those that are 
worth their keep when you haven't your eye 
on them, are as scarce as hens' teeth. There 
are good jobs looking for all the men that are 
good enough for them; if you want to prove 
it, start right in here, or go into the State and 
ask the farmers for a chance to work." 

I did not say that this last was the very 



56 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

thing I meant to do. Instead, I began to tell 
him of the cases that I knew of men, who, 
through no fault of their own, were out of 
work and were not free to go where it could be 
easily found. Mr. Boss was sympathetic with 
what was real and personal in the sufferings of 
unfortunate workers; and gathering encour- 
agement, I went on to speak of suffering no 
less real which was the result of sheer incapac- 
ity, a native weakness of will or lack of courage 
or perseverance. This made him smile again, 
and, with a twinkle in his eye, he asked me 
whether I did not think it was expecting a 
good deal of organized society to provide for 
the unfit. Then drawing out his watch, he 
glanced at it and, turning to me with a fine 
disregard of the outer man, he asked me to go 
home with him to supper. I should have been 
delighted. Perhaps I ought to have gone. I 
had not forgotten, however, a too hospitable 
minister in Connecticut; but at the next mo- 
ment I accepted gladly Mr. Boss's invitation 
to drive with him in the evening. 

Behind a sorrel filly that fairly danced 
with delight of motion, we set out an hour 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 57 

or more before sunset, and Mr. Ross drove 
first through business streets, pointing out to 
me the principal buildings as we passed, then 
up to the higher levels of the hillside, on which 
the city stands, through an attractive residence 
quarter. From there we could look down 
upon the river flowing between banks of 
wooded hills, with its swollen, muddy waters 
made radiant by the sunset. Then back to the 
lower city we went and out over the bridge to 
the military post of Rock Island, past the 
arsenal and the barracks to the officers' quar- 
ters among splendid trees and broad reaches of 
shaded lawn, and finally to an old farm-house, 
which had been the home of Colonel Daven- 
port at the time of his struggles with the 
Indians. It was not a distant date in actual 
years, but the contrast with the present sway of 
modern civilization seemed to link it with a 
far antiquity. 

The streets were ablaze with electrics as we 
drove through the cities of Rock Island and 
Moline, where the pavements were thronged 
by slowly moving crowds. 

When I left Minneapolis, a little more than 



58 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

a week later, I had in mind Mr. Boss's chal- 
lenge that any search for work in the interior 
of the State would discover abundant oppor- 
tunities. I was bound next, therefore, for the 
Iowa border. It would not have taken long to 
reach it at the usual rate of thirty miles a day. 
But I did not go through directly. For sev- 
eral days I worked for a fine old Irish farmer 
near Belle Plain, whose family was stanch 
Boman Catholic, and whose wife was a veri- 
table sister of mercy to the whole country side, 
indefatigable in ministry to the sick and poor. 
A few days later I stopped again and spent a 
memorable week as hired man on Mr. Barton's 
farm near Blue Earth City. 

It was well along in July, therefore, when 
I crossed into Iowa from the north, walking 
down by way of Elmore and Ledyard and Ban- 
croft to Algona, where I spent a few days and 
then set out for Council Bluffs. 

The walk from Algona to Council Bluffs 
was a matter of two hundred miles and a little 
more, perhaps. The heat was intense, but, 
apart from some discomfort due to that, it 
was a charming walk, leading on through re- 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 59 

gions that varied widely but constantly pre- 
sented new phases of native wealth. I should 
have enjoyed it more but for the awkward- 
ness of my position. It was embarrassing to 
meet the farmers, yet I wished to meet all 
that I could. It was not easy to frame an ex- 
cuse for not accepting the work that was con- 
stantly offered to me. To negotiate with a 
farmer for the job of helping with the chores 
in payment for a night's lodging and break- 
fast was trying to his temper, when he was 
at his wit's end for hands to help at the harvest- 
ing. I felt like one spying out the land and 
mocking its need. 

Through a long, hot afternoon I walked 
from Algona in the direction of Humboldt, 
some twenty-six miles to the south. The coun- 
try roads were deserted, the whole population 
being in the hay-fields, apparently. The corn, 
which was late in the planting, owing to the 
spring floods, was making now a measured 
growth of five inches in the day. 

In the evening twilight I passed through 
the Eoman Catholic community of St. James 
and walked on a few miles in the cool of the 



60 WITH IOWA FAEMERS 

evening. Not every farm-house that I saw 
wore an air of prosperity. I came upon one, 
which, even in the dark of a starlit night, gave 
evidence of infirm fortune. The garden-gate 
was off its hinges and was decrepit besides. 
With some difficulty I repropped it against the 
tottering posts when I entered. In a much 
littered cow-yard, I found a middle-aged 
farmer, who with his hired man had just fin- 
ished the evening milking. Without a word 
he stood pouring the last bucket of milk, slowly 
through a strainer into a milk-can on the other 
side of the fence, as he listened to an account 
of myself. What I wanted was a place to 
sleep and a breakfast in the morning. In re- 
turn I offered to do whatever amount of work 
he thought was fair. When the bucket was 
empty he gave me a deliberate look, then sim- 
ply asked me to follow him to the house. 
Throwing himself at full length on the sloping 
cellar-door, he pointed to a chair on the door- 
step near by as a seat for me, and began to 
question me about the crops in the country 
about Algona. I was fortunate enough to 
divert him soon to his own concerns, and, for 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 61 

an hour or more, I listened, while he told me of 
a long struggle on his farm. For fifteen years, 
he had worked hard, he said, and had seen the 
gradual settlement and growth of the region 
immediately about him; yet, with slightly 
varying fortunes, he was little better off than 
when he took up the farm as a pioneer. 

There was a mystery in it all that baffled 
him. Low prices were the ostensible cause of 
his ill-success; he could scarcely get more for 
his crops than they cost him ; but back of low 
prices was something else, an incalculable 
power which took vague form in his mind as 
a conspiracy of the rich, who seemed to him 
not to work and yet to have unmeasured 
wealth, while he and his kind could hardly live 
at the cost of almost unceasing toil. 

By five o'clock in the morning we were at 
the chores, and were hungry enough when the 
summons came to breakfast at a little after six. 
There is, in certain forms of it, a cheerlessness 
in farm-life the gloom of which would be diffi- 
cult to heighten. The call to breakfast came 
from the kitchen, which was a shed-like annex 
to the small, decaying, wooden farm-house. 



62 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

The farmer, the hired man, and I washed our- 
selves at the kitchen-door, then passed from the 
clear sunlight into a room whose smoke-black- 
ened walls were hung round with kitchen uten- 
sils. The air was hot and dense with the 
fumes and smoke of cooking. A slovenly 
woman stood over the stove, turning potatoes 
that were frying in a pan, while, at the same 
time, she scolded two ragged children, who 
sat at the table devouring the food with their 
eyes. 

Scarcely a word was spoken during the meal, 
until, near its close, the farmer's wife quite 
abruptly — as though resuming an interrupted 
conversation — broke into further account of a 
horse-thief, whose latest escapade had been not 
far away, but those whereabouts remained un- 
known. The very obvious point of which was 
that, however her husband had been imposed 
upon, my efforts to pass as an honest man had 
not met with unqualified success with her. In 
such manner the breakfast was saved from dul- 
ness, and I was sure that the parting guest 
was heartily speeded when my stint was done. 

There is a high exhilaration in a day's walk, 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 63 

even in the heat of July. The feeling of 
abounding life that comes with the opening 
day after sound sleep and abundant food, 
when one is free from care, and there are 
twelve hours of daylight ahead for leagues of 
delightful country, is like the pulse of a kingly 
sport. From higher points of rolling land I 
could see far over the squares marked by the 
regularly recurring roads that intersect one 
another at right angles at intervals of a mile. 
The farm-houses stood hidden each in a small 
grove, with the wheel of a windmill invariably 
whirling above the tree-tops, and with here 
and there a long winding line of willows and 
stunted oaks marking the course of a stream. 

It was but twelve miles to Humboldt, and 
I stopped there only long enough to ask the 
way to Fort Dodge. The roads were as de- 
serted as on the day before, and I was some 
distance past Humboldt before I fell in with 
a single farmer. 

He came rumbling down the road, sitting 
astride the frame of a farm-wagon from which 
the box had been removed. The fine dust was 
puffing like white smoke about his dangling 



64 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

legs, while the massive harness rattled over 
the big- jointed frames of the horses. 

" You may as well ride," he called, as he 
overtook me, and I lost no time in getting on 
behind. 

More fruitful as a field of conversation 
even than the weather were the crops at that 
season. I had picked up a smattering of 
the lingo, and we were soon commenting 
on the abundant yield of hay, and the fair 
promise of rye and wheat, and the favorable 
turn that the unbroken heat had given to 
the prospects of the corn, in the hope that 
it held, in spite of the late planting, of its 
ripening before the coming of the frost. But, 
for all the good outlook, the farmer was far 
from cheerful. I suspected the cause of his 
depression and avoided it from fear of embar- 
rassment to myself, while yet I wished to hear 
his views about the situation. When they 
came, they were what I anticipated : 

A good hay crop? Yes, there could hardly 
be a better, but of what use was hay that 
rotted in the fields before you could house it, 
for want of hands? And this was but the be- 
ginning of the difficulty. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 65 

The whole harvest lay ahead, and the ad- 
vancing summer brought no solution of the 
problem of " help." He was very graphic in 
his account of the year-around need of men 
that grows acutest in midsummer, and I did 
not escape the embarrassment that I feared; 
for, when he pressed me to go to work for him, 
I could only urge weakly that I felt obliged to 
hurry on. He was glad to be rid of me at the 
parting of our ways, a little farther down the 
road, where he turned to the unequal strug- 
gle on his farm, while I walked on at leisure 
in the direction of Fort Dodge. 

A heave of the great plain raised me pres- 
ently to a height, from which, far over the roll 
of the intervening fields, with the warm sun- 
light on their varying growths, I could see the 
church spires in the town surrounded almost 
by wooded hills, with the Des Moines Eiver 
flowing among them. The air was full of the 
distant clatter of mowing machines, which car- 
ries with it the association of stinging heat and 
the patient hum of bees and the fragrance of 
new hay. 

As I descended into the next hollow there 



66 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

came driving toward me a young farmer. He 
was seated on a mower, his eyes fixed on the 
wide swath cut by the machine in its course 
just within a zigzag rail fence that flanked the 
road. The green timothy fell before the blade 
in thick, soft, dewy widths that carpeted the 
meadow. A chance glance into the road dis- 
covered me, and he brought the horses to a 
stand. As he pushed back his hat from his 
streaming forehead, I could see that he was 
young, but much worn with care and over- 
work. 

" Will you take a job with me? " he asked, 
and the wonder of it was the greater, since 
that whole region has through it a strong 
Yankee strain, and men of such stock are sore 
pressed when they come to the point without 
preliminaries. 

Again I had to resort to a feeble excuse of 
necessity to go farther; but, curious as to the 
response, I ventured an inquiry about the 
local demand for men. 

" Oh, everyone needs men," the farmer 
rejoined impatiently, as, tightening the reins 
and adjusting his hat, he started the horses, 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 67 

anxious, evidently, to drown further idle talk 
in the sharp noise of the swift-mowing knives. 

In the river valley I was not long in finding 
a lane which disappeared among a scattered 
growth of stunted trees in the direction of a 
rocky bluff that marked the bed of the stream. 
Every day's march brought some chance of a 
bath, and, at times, I was fortunate enough to 
fall in with two or three in thirty miles, and 
nothing could be more restful or refreshing in 
a long walk, or a better preventive against 
the stiffness that is apt to accompany it. Here 
I could both bathe and swim about, and when 
I regained the highway, it was almost with 
the feeling of vigor of the early morning. 

The main-travelled road did not lead me, as 
I expected, into Fort Dodge, but to an inter- 
section of two roads, a little west of the town. 
Instead of going eastward into the city, I 
turned to the west, in the direction of Tara, a 
small village on a branch of the Rock Island 
Railway. The setting sun was shining full 
in my face, but no longer with much effect of 
heat. As I hurried on in the fast cooling air, 
the way led by an abrupt descent into a ravine, 



68 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

where flowed a small tributary of the Des 
Moines among rocks and sheer banks, forming 
a striking contrast with the rolling prairie. It 
was but a break in the plain. From the top 
of the opposite bank, the land stretched away 
again in undulating surface, with much evi- 
dence of richness of soil and the wealth of the 
farmers. 

Not without exception, however; for, at 
nightfall, I was nearing a small house, through 
whose coating of white paint the blackened 
weather-boards appeared with an effect of 
much dilapidation. When I entered the gar- 
den, passing under low shade-trees, I met a 
sturdy Irishman, bare-headed, and in his shirt- 
sleeves, whose thin white hair and beard alone 
suggested advancing years. 

There was no difficulty in dealing with him. 
He was not in need of a hired man, but was 
perfectly willing that I should have supper and 
breakfast at his home and a bed in the barn 
on the terms of a morning stint. Accord- 
ingly, I followed light-heartedly into the 
kitchen, where, in the dim light, I saw his 
wife and a married daughter, with her son, a 
lad of six or eight. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 69 

Supper was ready; with every mark of 
kindly hospitality, the farmer's wife, a moth- 
erly body with an ill-defined waist, made ready 
for me at the table, moving lightly about, in 
spite of age and bulk, in bare feet, that ap- 
peared from under the skirt of a dark print 
dress with an apron covering its ample front. 
A lamp was lighted, and from the vague walls 
there looked down upon us the faces of saints 
in bright-colored prints. A kitchen clock 
ticked on the mantel-shelf, and a kettle was 
singing on an iron stove that projected half 
way into the room. We supped on tea and 
bread and hard biscuits, while the farmer ques- 
tioned me about the crops along the day's 
route, and his wife heaved deep sighs and 
broke into a muttered " The Lord bless us! " 
when I owned to having walked some thirty- 
five miles since morning. 

I was charmed with my new acquaintances. 
There was no embarrassment in being with 
them, and nothing of restraint or gloom in 
their home. After supper I pumped the 
water for the stock, and helped with the milk- 
ing. When the chores were done, I asked 



70 WITH IOWA FAKMEKS 

leave to go to bed. A heavy quilt and pillow 
were given to me, and, spreading them upon 
the hay, I slept the sleep of a child. 

The cows had been milked in the morning 
and were about to be driven to pasture, when 
there arose a difficulty in separating from its 
mother a calf that was to be weaned. The calf 
had to be penned in the shed, while the old 
cow went afield with the others. To imprison 
it, however, proved no easy undertaking. 
"With the agility of a half-back, it dodged us 
all over the cow-yard, encouraged by the calls 
of its mother, from the lane, and it evaded the 
shed-door with an obstinacy that was responsi- 
ble for adding materially to the content of the 
old man's next confession. 

For some time his wife stood by, her bare 
feet in the grass, her arms akimbo, and her 
gray hair waving in the morning breeze, as, 
with unfeigned scorn, she watched our baffled 
manoeuvres. She could not endure it long. 

" I'll catch the beast," she shouted presently 
in richest brogue ; and, true to her word, by a 
simple strategy, she surprised the little brute 
and had it by a hind leg before it suspected her 
nearness. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 71 

But capture was no weak surrender on the 
part of the calf. For its dear life it kicked, 
and the picture of the hardy old woman, 
shaken in every muscle under the desperate 
lunges of the calf, as, clinging with both hands 
to its leg, she called to us with lusty expletives, 
to help her before she was " killed entirely," 
is one that lingers gleefully in memory. The 
old man winked at me his infinite appreciation 
of the scene, and between us we relieved his 
panting wife and soon housed the calf. 

When my work was done, and I had said 
good-by to the family, whose hospitality I had 
so much enjoyed, I set out for Gowrie, which 
was twenty odd miles away. At Tara I found 
that, to avoid a long detour, I must take to the 
railway as far, at least, as Moorland, the next 
station on the line. Walking the track was 
sometimes a necessity, but always an unwel- 
come one. It is weary work to plod on and 
on, over an unwavering route, where an occa- 
sional passing train mocks one's slow advance, 
and where, for miles the only touch of human 
nature is in a shanty of a section boss, with 
ragged children playing about it, and a hag- 



72 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

gard woman plying her endless task, while a 
mongrel or two barks after one, far down the 
line. 

At Moorland I resumed the highway, and 
held to it with uneventful march, until, with- 
in a mile or two of Gowrie, two men in a 
# market-wagon overtook me and offered me a 
lift into the village. 

To me the notable event of the day was a 
drive of several miles with a farmer, in the 
afternoon. He had been to the freight sta- 
tion in Gowrie, to get there a reaper, which 
had been ordered out from Chicago. The ma- 
chine, in all the splendor of fresh paint, lay in 
the body of the wagon, while he sat alone on 
the high seat in front. 

When, at his invitation, I climbed up be- 
side him, I was delighted with the first impres- 
sion of the man. In the prime of life and of 
very compact figure, his small dark eyes, that 
were the brighter for contrast with a swarthy 
complexion, moved with an alertness that de- 
noted energy and force. Individuality was 
stamped upon him and showed itself in the 
trick of the eye, and in every tone of his voice. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 73 

He asked me where I was going, and said 
that he could take me five miles over the road 
toward Jefferson, " unless," he added, " you'll 
stop at my farm and work for me." 

I thanked him, but said that I would keep 
to the road for the present, and then I changed 
the subject to the reaper. It was of the make 
of the factory in which, for eight weeks, dur- 
ing the previous winter, I worked as a hand- 
truckman, and very full of association it was as 
I looked upon it in changed surroundings. 
Hundreds of such tongues John Barry and I 
had loaded on our truck in the paint-shop, then 
stacked them under the eaves over the plat- 
form; scores of such binders we had trans- 
ferred from the dark warehouses to the wait- 
ing freight-cars below. Equally familiar 
looked the " wider," and the receptacle for 
twine, and the " binder," and the " bar." I 
told the farmer that I had been a hand in the 
factory where his machine was made, and he 
appeared interested in the account of the vast 
industry where two thousand men work to- 
gether in so perfect a system of the division of 
labor, that a complete reaper, like his own, is 



74 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

turned out in periods of a few minutes in every 
working day. 

He, too, was autobiographical in his turn. 
His history was one of the innumerable ex- 
amples at the West of substantial success 
under the comparatively simple advantages 
of good health and an unbounded capacity 
for work. 

From an early home in Pennsylvania, he 
drifted, as a mere boy, into Indiana, and 
" living out " there to a farmer, he remained 
with him for -&ve years. Shrewd enough to 
see his opportunity, and to seize it, he made 
himself master of farming, and became so in- 
dispensable to his employer that he was soon 
making more than twenty dollars a month and 
his keep the year around. At the end of five 
years he had saved a little more than eight 
hundred dollars, which he invested in a mort- 
gage on good land. Then came his Wan- 
der jahre. He went to Colorado, worked for 
two years on a sheep ranch, and looked for 
chances of fortune. They were not wholly 
wanting, but the prospects were distant, and, 
rather than endure longer the lonely life of the 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 75 

frontier, he returned as far as Iowa, and 
bought his present farm at the rate of ten dol- 
lars an acre. For twelve years he had lived 
and worked upon it. Under improvement, 
and the growth of population about it, its 
value had risen threefold, for he had re- 
cently added to it a neighboring farm, for 
which he had to pay at the rate of thirty 
dollars an acre. 

The narrative was piquant in the extreme. 
There was in it so ingenuous a belief in the 
order of things under which he had risen un- 
aided from the position of a hired man to that 
of a hirer of men. Like Mr. Ross, he had no 
quarrel with social conditions, except that they 
no longer furnished him with such hands as 
he himself had been. Under the demoraliza- 
tion of a demand for men far in excess of the 
supply, the agricultural laborers of the present 
sit lightly on their places, and are mere time 
servers, he said, with no personal interest in 
their employers' affairs. He seemed to imply 
a causal relation between the condition of the 
labor market as it affects the farmer and the 
degeneracy in agricultural laborers. But 



76 WITH IOWA FAEMERS 

whether he meant that or not, he was certainly 
clear in an insistence that, from his point of 
view, the social difficulty is one of individual 
inefficiency, and hardly ever takes the form 
of any real hindrance to a genuine purpose to 
get on in the world. All along our route he 
enforced the point by actual illustration, show- 
ing how one farmer, by closest attention to 
business, had freed himself of the obligations 
at first incurred in taking up the land, and had 
added farm to farm, while such another, less 
efficient than his neighbor, had gone down 
under a burden of debt. 

I opened the gate, and stood watching him 
as he drove up the long lane leading to his 
house and barns, while the horses quickened 
their pace in conscious nearness to their stalls. 
A Philistine of the Philistines in the impreg- 
nable castle of his hard-earned home, I could 
but like and honor him. 

Under the stars, on top of a load of hay that 
had been left standing in a barn-yard in the 
outskirts of Jefferson, I slept that night, and 
spent most of the next day, which was Sun- 
day, under the trees of the town square, in 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 77 

front of the court-house, going in the morning 
to a Methodist church, where awaited me the 
courteous welcome which I found at all church 
doors, whether in the country or the town. 
For food I had a large loaf of bread, which I 
had purchased for ten cents at Gowrie. A 
little beyond Jefferson, after a delightful bath 
in the Raccoon River, with the uncommon 
luxury of a sandy bottom, I got leave of a 
farmer on the road to Scranton to sleep in his 
barn, and, after the rest of Sunday, I set out 
on Monday morning keen and fit for the re- 
maining walk to Council Bluffs. 

Monday's march took me from a point not 
far west of Jefferson, by way of Coon Rapids, 
to the heart of the hills in the neighborhood 
of Templeton, where I spent the night on the 
farm of a Scotsman of the name of Hardy. 
The heat of the day was prodigious. Not like 
the languid heat of the tropics, it was as 
though the earth burned with fever which 
communicated itself in a nervous quiver to the 
hot, dry air, and quickened one's steps along 
the baking roads. The stillness was almost 
appalling, and, as I passed great fields of 



78 WITH IOWA FARMEES 

standing corn, I could fancy that I heard it 
grow with a crackle as of visible outbudding 
of the blades. 

I did not walk all the way. Twice in the 
day I had a lift, both of several miles, and 
each with a farmer whose views differed as 
widely from the other's as though they were 
separated by a thousand miles, instead of being 
relatively next-door neighbors. 

The first lift came in the morning along a 
main-travelled road which I took in the hope 
of meeting an intersecting one that would lead 
me on to Manning. A good-looking young 
farmer, fair-haired and blue-eyed, asked me to 
the seat at his side high above the box of a 
farm wagon. We were not long in learning 
that both were interested in the economics of 
farming, where he knew much and I little, 
and where I was glad to be a listener. It was 
like talking again with a socialist from a sweat- 
shop in Chicago. The fire of a new religion 
was in him. The difference lay chiefly in that 
his was not the gospel of society made new and 
good by doing away with private property and 
substituting a collective holding of all the land 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 79 

and capital that are made use of for produc- 
tion; his gospel was that of " free silver," but 
he held it with a like unshaken faith in its 
regenerating power. For months he had been 
preaching it, and organizing night classes 
among the farmers in all the district school- 
houses within reach, for the purpose of study 
of the money question. Just once in the talk 
with me he grew convincing. There was 
much of the usual insistence of " a conspiracy 
among rich men against the producing 
classes," whatever that may mean, and there 
were significant statements to the effect that 
nine-tenths of the farmers of the region, which 
he proudly called " The Garden of Eden of 
the West," were under mortgage to money- 
lenders, and that farmers in general, owing to 
the tyranny of " the money power," were fast 
sinking to a condition of " vassalage; " but at 
last he rose to something more intelligible. It 
was the sting of a taunt that roused him. He 
had seen copied from an Eastern newspaper 
the statement that Western farmers were 
beginning to want free silver, because they 
grasped at a chance to pay their debts at 



80 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

fifty cents on the dollar. The man was 
fine in his resentment of the charge of dis- 
honor. 

" We mean to pay our honest debts in full," 
he said; " but see how the thing works out: 
I borrowed a thousand dollars when wheat was 
selling at a dollar a bushel. If I raised a 
thousand bushels, I could pay my debt by sell- 
ing them. But when wheat has fallen to fifty 
cents a bushel, I must raise two thousand to 
meet the obligation. That came of apprecia- 
tion in the value of money. It is to the inter- 
est of Wall Street men to have it so, while we 
need an increased volume of money. They 
deal in dollars and we in wheat, and the more 
they can make us raise for a dollar, the better 
off they are. It costs me as much time and 
labor and wages to raise a thousand bushels of 
wheat as when it sold for a dollar, and the 
justice of the case would be in my paying my 
debt with a thousand bushels, for I don't raise 
dollars, I raise wheat." 

No abstract reasoning or historical examples 
could have convinced him that an appreciation 
in the value of money was due to causes other 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 81 

than a conspiracy among what he called " the 
money kings," who, in some manner, had got 
control of the volume of currency and so de- 
termined the prices of commodities. But 
with all his hallucinations in finance, it was 
very plain that the charge of dishonesty had 
been misapplied. 

It was toward the end of the day's march 
that I came by the second lift. For miles the 
country had grown more hilly, and when I 
left behind me the village of Coon Rapids I 
found myself climbing a hill that was really 
steep, then making a sharp descent into a 
valley, only to begin another hill longer and 
steeper than any before. 

I was slowly ascending one of the longest 
hills when a farmer in a light market wagon 
called to me, making offer of a drive. I wait- 
ed at the crest of the hill and climbed to the 
seat at his side, while the horses stood panting 
lightly in the cooler air that moved across the 
hill-tops. 

In the two or three miles that we drove to- 
gether, the farmer conversed very freely. 
Quite as well informed as my acquaintance of 



82 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

the morning, lie was of sturdier calibre than 
he, and the difference in their views was com- 
plete. He knew of no conspiracy against 
farmers or any " producing class," and he held 
that almost the most disastrous thing that 
could be done would be to disturb the stability 
of the currency. An appreciation in the value 
of money there had been, but it was plainly 
due to causes at work the world over, and quite 
beyond any man's control. Farmers were suf- 
fering from it now; but a few years ago they 
had profited by appreciation in the value of 
crops, and might look hopefully for a return 
of better times for them. As to the farmers 
of that part of Iowa, their fortune had been 
of the best. These hills were looked upon at 
first as the least desirable land and were last to 
be taken up, but had proved, when once de- 
veloped, almost the richest soil in the State. 
The farmers who settled there had found them- 
selves, in consequence, in possession of land 
that was constantly increasing in value. 
From $10 an acre it had quickly risen to $20, 
and many of the owners would now reluctantly 
yield their farms for $40 an acre. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 83 

There was nothing boastful in the state- 
ments. My informant was a person of quiet 
speech and manner, but he had the advantage 
of being able to enforce from concrete ex- 
amples all that he had to say, and the histories 
of most of the farmers, and every transaction 
in real estate for miles around seemed to be at 
his command. 

Nothing could have fitted better the mood 
in which I left him than my meeting that 
evening with Mr. Hardy, at whose farm I 
spent the night. A genial Scotsman of clear, 
open countenance, whose deep, rich voice 
seemed always on the verge of laughter; he 
welcomed me right heartily, and gave me sup- 
per of the best and a bed in the granary on 
fragrant hay, which he spread there with his 
own hands, and a breakfast in the morning; 
and for all this he would accept return, neither 
in work nor pay. 

We talked long together of English politics, 
but he was at his best on the condition of the 
Iowa farmer. A more contented man I have 
rarely met, nor a man of more contagious 
good-humor. As a youth he came from Scot- 



84 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

land, and had been a pioneer among these Iowa 
hills. For him the hardships were all gone 
from farming, as compared with his early ex- 
perience. An accessible market, admirable 
labor-saving machines, ready intercourse with 
neighbors and with the outside world, had 
changed the original struggle under every dis- 
advantage to a life of ease in contrast. Very 
glad I should be of the chance to accept his 
parting invitation to return at some time to 
his home. 

Early in Tuesday's march a young Swedish 
farmer picked me up, and carried me on to 
within five miles of Manning; and, a little west 
of the town, I fell in with another farmer, 
who shared his seat with me over six miles of 
the way. A third lift of a couple of miles into 
Irwin helped me much on the road to Kirk- 
man. I had not reached the village, however, 
when night fell. At a farm, a mile or more 
to the east of it, I found as warm a welcome as 
on the night before. Supper was ready, and 
room was made for me ; then I lent a hand at 
the milking with the hired men. Last, be- 
fore going to bed, we had a swim. The 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 85 

farmer kept for the purpose a pool in the barn- 
yard which was well supplied with constantly 
changing water, and nothing could have been 
more grateful after a day of work and walking 
in a temperature of 105° in the shade. I 
should liked to have remained there as a hired 
man almost as much as with Mr. Hardy, but 
the journey to Council Bluffs was now well 
under way, and I was bent upon completing it 
before another long stop. 

On Wednesday I wished to reduce as much 
as possible the distance to Neola, which is a 
village at the junction of the St. Paul and 
Eock Island railways; but I had to spend the 
night a few miles southwest of Shelby. This 
was because I was not so fortunate as on the 
day before in the matter of lifts. I got but 
one drive that day. Turning from Kirkman 
into the stage-road leading into Harlan, the 
county-seat of Audubon County, I saw ap- 
proaching me a buggy containing two men. I 
stepped aside to let it pass, but it stopped be- 
side me, and one of the men invited me to get 
in. The country doctor was writ large upon 
him, and, at his side, was a coatless, collarless, 



86 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

taciturn youth, who clearly was his " hired 
man." Crowded between them I sat down, 
and the physician turned his sharp, genial eyes 
upon me. 

" Where are you from? " 

" Where are you going? " 

" How old are you? " 

" What's your name? " 

" Where do you expect to go when you 
die? " 

" Why don't you shave ? " 

Such were the questions that, with almost 
fierce rapidity, he plied me with, waiting 
meanwhile for but the briefest answer to each. 
And when the ordeal was over, he laughed a 
low, shrewd laugh while his eyes twinkled mer- 
rily, as he remarked, dryly: " I guess you'll 
do." 

He allowed me no time to acknowledge the 
compliment, but went swiftly on: 

" Do you know that Mr. Frick has been shot 
and may die? " 

I did not know it, for I had not seen a news- 
paper since leaving Algona, and my inter- 
course had been with farmers whose news 
reaches them by the weekly press. 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 87 

It was an exceedingly tragic climax to the 
situation at Homestead, and not without in- 
fluence in determining the sympathies of the 
Western farmers with the issues involved 
there. It had been amazing to me to discover 
how keen was the interest taken in the strike 
all along my route, and it was not a little sig- 
nificant, I thought, to find everywhere a strong 
indignation against the use of a private police 
force in accomplishing ends legal in themselves 
and fully provided for by law and usage. So 
far in the struggle the feeling of the farmers 
was with the men. Beyond that they ap- 
peared uncertain. There was a question of 
fact to begin with. Did the cut affect more 
the hands who were working for a dollar and a 
half a day or the skilled workmen who were 
reported to get, some of them as much as fif- 
teen dollars ? Until this was clear, there could 
be but speculation. 

Most interesting of all, I had found their 
attitude toward the question that was widely 
raised of a right the workmen were said to have 
in the property at Homestead, apart from their 
wages, on the ground of their having created 



88 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

its value. Here was the real issue of modern 
industrialism, and on it I found the farmers 
conservative, to say the least. 

The American farmer is a landed proprietor 
with a gift for logical tendencies that does him 
credit. His chiefest aim is to maintain, if 
possible, his economic independence, and a doc- 
trine that would give to his hired man an ulti- 
mate claim to ownership in his farm is not one 
that is likely soon to meet with wide accept- 
ance among his class. 

It was with the physician that I talked these 
matters over, and I was interested to find my 
experience confirmed by that of so expert an 
observer, whose chances were so good. 

Very reluctantly I parted from him at his 
door and made in the direction of Neola. 
Owing to rains that delayed me on Thursday, 
I did not enter Neola until the middle of the 
afternoon of that day, and there I did not stop 
in passing, but pressed on to Underwood, 
where I spent the night. 

Friday was clear again and hot, but the 
roads were difficult, and I had to desert them 
for the lines of the St. Paul and Rock Island 



WITH IOWA FARMERS 89 

railways, that parallel each other side by side 
for several miles into Council Bluffs. 

For the past day I had not had a single offer 
of a job. The farmers, as I approached the 
town, seemed either less in need of men or 
less willing to take up with a chance wayfarer. 
No doubt I should have had no difficulty had 
I set about a search for work. Certainly I 
could not have fared better than I did for din- 
ner at a farm, where I was allowed to lend a 
hand with a load of hay. And after dinner, 
when the farmer and I talked together for an 
hour, I found in him the same contentment 
which struck me as so general among Iowa 
farmers. 

But my letters were in the Post-office at 
Omaha, and I felt impatient of delay until I 
should get them. I did not get them on that 
day, however, nor for several days to come. 
In Council Bluffs I met the unlooked-for bar- 
rier of a toll-bridge across the Missouri. Five 
cents would give me a right of way, but I had 
only one, and must, therefore, look for work. 
I counted myself very fortunate when, at 
nightfall, I got a job in a livery-stable. 



90 WITH IOWA FARMERS 

I had crossed Iowa, and Mr. Boss's promise 
had been abundantly fulfilled. On any day 
of the march I could have found a dozen 
places for the asking, and scarcely a day had 
passed that I had not repeatedly been asked to 
go to work. I should have thought this a 
condition peculiar to the harvest time, had not 
many of the farmers told me that, while their 
need is greatest then, it is so constant always 
that no good man need ever be long without 
work among them. 



A SECTION-HAND ON THE 
UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 



A SECTION-HAND ON THE 
UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 

IT cost five cents to go from Council Bluffs 
to Omaha in the summer of 1892. 
That was the toll of a foot passenger in cross- 
ing the bridge which, spanning the Missouri, 
joined the two cities. It was a reasonable 
toll, I dare say, and paid probably no more 
than a fair return on the capital invested in 
the bridge, but it was five cents and I had only 
one. One dingy copper coin, with its Indian 
head and laurel wreath, was all that was left of 
the savings from my last job. I must, there- 
fore, find work in Council Bluffs, and the let- 
ters which had been waiting for me in Omaha 
must wait a little longer. But I felt fagged, 
for I had reached the end of a six days' walk 
of some 200 miles, so I took a seat on a bench 

in the shade in the public square near a foun- 
93 



94 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

tain, whose play was soothing in the heat of a 
midsummer afternoon. 

I thought regretfully then of the farmer 
with whom I dined at noon that day, and with 
whom I might have remained as a hired man. 
Besides, I remembered with some concern two 
men on foot who met me on the outskirts of 
Council Bluffs. 

" Where are you from, partner? " one of 
them asked, with some bluster in his manner. 

" I've just come down through the State 
from Algona," I replied. 

" Is there any work out the way you 
came? " 

" Lots of it," I assured him. 

" Well, there ain't none the way you're 
goin'. Me and me pal is wore out lookin' for 
a job in Omaha and Council Bluffs." 

I had come 1,500 miles as a wage-earner, 
and I had 1,500 yet to go before I should reach 
the Pacific, but not yet had it been hard to 
find work of some sort, except when I chose 
to stay in a crowded city in winter. The 
anxiety that I felt in this instance proved 
groundless, for when, in the cool of the even- 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 95 

ing, I looked for employment I found it at the 
third application, and I went to bed that night 
a hostler in a livery-stable at a wage of twenty 
dollars a month and board at a " Fifth Ave- 
nue " hotel. 

Ten dollars less twelve cents, which were 
due for the hire of books at a stationer's shop, 
were clear gain at the end of two weeks' ser- 
vice in the stable. But the necessity of writ- 
ing up notes and of answering many letters, 
besides the allurements of a public library, 
kept me for several days in Omaha, so that my 
cash had dwindled, when, one afternoon about 
the middle of August, I left the city, with the 
broad State of Nebraska as the next step of the 
journey. 

It was natural to follow the Union Pacific 
Railway. It takes its course westward 
through the State, and is paralleled by a main- 
travelled road that connects the frequent set- 
tlements along the line. Just out of Omaha 
the railroad makes a southern bend, and I 
avoided this by following the directer course 
of the highway that led next morning to a 
meeting with the rails at Elkhorn. The go- 



96 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

ing there was of the plainest. The railway 
followed the northern bank of the Platte River 
and the road followed the rail. If the day was 
wet, I left the road and walked the sleepers; 
if the day was dry, I walked the road, but al- 
ways I was within easy hail of a lift, and so 
fell in with many an interesting farmer and 
was saved many miles of walking. 

It was late in the afternoon of a rainy day 
that there chanced a lift of the most timely. 
From low, heavy clouds had been falling since 
early morning a misty rain that almost floated 
in the warm, still air. For a hundred yards 
together I might find a tolerable path along 
the turf at the edge of the road. Then, as the 
mud grew deeper, I took to the rails and kept 
them, until the monotony of the sleepers drove 
me to the mire again. I had seen scarcely a 
soul that day except the fleeting figures on the 
trains and an occasional bedraggled section- 
hand who looked sullenly at me, barely deign- 
ing a salutation as I passed. It seemed hardly 
worth while to be abroad, but I had found it 
generally best to stick to the road when I 
could, and I was beginning now to think of a 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 97 

shelter for the night and trying to find some 
satisfaction in having covered more than 
twenty miles since morning. 

The rumble of a heavy wagon began to 
sound down the road; and when I could hear 
the splash of the horses' hoofs near by, I was 
delighted to catch the call of the driver, as he 
asked me to a seat at his side. He was a farm- 
hand, young and muscular and slouching, as 
he sat stoop-shouldered, with the lines held 
loosely in his bare hands, while the rain 
dripped from a felt hat upon the shining sur- 
face of his rubber coat. 

Why he had asked me to ride I could not 
clearly see, for he scarcely turned his lack- 
lustre eyes upon me when I climbed up beside 
him, and he seemed not in the least anxious to 
talk. 

We were driving through a region that was 
growing familiar from its changelessness. 
On every side were fields of corn, unfenced, 
and bounded only by the horizon, apparently, 
as they stretched away into cloudy space. 
Like islands in a sea of standing corn were 
widely scattered groups of farm buildings, 



98 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

their clusters of cottonwood-trees about them 
and sometimes a fruit orchard. And if there 
was any other break in the monotony of corn, 
it was where vast acres had been turned to 
raising beets for the sugar trade. Hardly a 
swell marred the level of the prairie, and the 
rails reached endlessly on in an unbending line 
across the plain. 

The usual subjects of conversation were of 
no avail with my new acquaintance. He was 
not interested in corn and only languidly in 
the experiment with beets, and the general 
election failed to move him, although he vent- 
ured so far as to insist that there was no hope 
for the farmers of the West until the free 
coinage of silver should be secured. His 
mood was in keeping with 'the day, and life 
was " flat, unprofitable, and stale." 

He quickened finally, to the theme of work, 
but only as a vent to his depression. Work 
was plentiful enough; for such as he, life was 
little else than work, but of what profit was it 
to slave your soul out for enough to eat and to 
wear and a place to sleep ? 

There was no escaping the tragedy of the 



UNION PACIFIC KAILWAY 99 

man's history as lie told me simply of his 
father's death from overwork in an attempt to 
pay off the mortgage on the farm and how his 
mother was left to the unequal struggle. He 
himself was eleven then, and the elder of two 
children; he could remember clearly how the 
home was lost — the accumulated labor of 
many years. From that time his life had 
been an unbroken struggle for existence, 
against odds of sickness that again and again 
had swept away his earnings and thrown him 
back to the dependence of an agricultural 
laborer. 

Once his savings had gone in quite another 
fashion. It was at the very point when there 
seemed to have come a change for the better 
in his fortunes. He was $200 to the good at 
the end of the last autumn, and with this as 
an opening wedge he meant to force a way 
eventually to independent business of his own. 
So he went to Omaha, and, in one of the em- 
ployment bureaus there, he met a man, past 
middle life, who offered him work on a stock 
farm twenty miles below the city. Thirty 

dollars a month were to be his wages from the 
LofC. 



100 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

first, if he proved himself worth so much, and 
there was to be an increase when he earned it. 
In the meanwhile, he would be learning the 
trade of rearing horses for the market, and, if 
he chose to invest his savings in the business, 
when he knew it better, there could be no surer 
way, his informer said, to a paying enterprise 
of his own. 

He was committing himself to nothing, he 
found, so he decided to give the place a trial. 
His new employer and he left the office to- 
gether, and, having an hour before train time, 
they went to a restaurant for dinner, and the 
stock farmer told his man much in detail of 
the farm. He was an elderly person of quiet 
manner, very plain of speech, and friendly 
withal, and very thoughtful; for when they 
were about to leave the restaurant, he opened 
a small leather bag that he carried guardedly 
and, disclosing a bank book and a considerable 
sum of money, which he had drawn to pay the 
monthly wages of the hands, he suggested to 
our friend to deposit with them his own valu- 
ables in safety from the risk of pickpockets 
about the station and in the cars, adding, mean- 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 101 

while, that he would then entrust the bag to 
him, as there were one or two places where he 
wished to call on the way to the train. 

The farm-hand held the bag firmly as his 
employer and he walked down the street to- 
gether, and very firmly as he waited in a shop, 
where his boss left him with the plea that he 
had an errand in an office overheard, but would 
return in a few minutes. The minutes grew 
to an hour, and the youth would have been 
anxious had it not been that the bag with his 
savings was safe in his keeping. But when 
the second hour was nearly gone, his feeling 
was one of anxiety for the boss, until a ques- 
tion to the shop-keeper led to the opening of 
the bag and the discovery that it contained 
some old newspapers and nothing more. 

He went back to the farm then and worked 
all winter and through the summer that was 
now nearing its end, but illness in his family 
had consumed his earnings, and, at the end of 
fourteen years of labor, he was very much 
where he started as a lad, apart from added 
strength and experience. 

That evening, in a village inn, while the 



102 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

rain poured without, I sat cheek by jowl with a 
Knight Templar who had just returned from a 
convention of his order in Denver. It was 
not the meeting that now inspired him ; it was 
the mountains. Keared on the prairie, he had 
never seen even hills before, and the sight of 
the earth rising from a plain until it touched 
high heaven was like giving to his mind the 
sense of a new dimension. For hours, he said, 
he would let his eyes wander from Long's Peak 
to Pike's and back again, while his imagina- 
tion lost itself among the gorges and dark 
canons, and in the midsummer glitter of aged 
snow. There lay the charm of it, in the plain 
telling of the opening to him of a world of 
majesty and beauty such as he had never 
dreamed of, revealing powers of reverence and 
admiration that he had not known were his. 

The humor of it, touched with charm, was 
all in his description of concrete experience of 
the new world of mystery. His account of an 
ascent of Pike's Peak would have made the 
reputation of a humorist. An expedition to 
the Pole could hardly take itself more seri- 
ously. A few of his fellow-knights and he, 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 103 

with the ladies who were of their company, 6et 
out at midnight from Manitou to make sure 
of reaching the summit (a four hours' walk) 
before dark of the following day. Not " the 
steep ascent of heaven " is beset with greater 
difficulty and danger for a struggling saint 
than was the climb along the line of a " cog " 
railway for this band of knights-errant and 
ladies fair. One can readily conceive the peril 
of the adventure — for feet accustomed only to 
the prairie — in treading from midnight until 
dawn the brinks of yawning chasms, with 
water falling in the dark. 

Nor did day dispel the terrors. The preci- 
pices were still there and a growing awfulness 
in the height above the plain that caused a 
" giddiness " which was the harder to resist 
because of the increasing difficulty of breath- 
ing the rarefied air. Some of the women 
fainted on the way, and the last hour's climb 
was an agony to all the company; for now the 
effort of a few steps exhausted them, and they 
despaired of ever reaching the goal. 

It was past noon when finally they sank 
down at the summit in the shelter of rocks that 



104 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

shielded them from the piercing wind and ate 
what was left of their store of provision. 

The unconscious exaggeration took now a 
form even more comical in an account of what 
was visible from the mountain. I have heard, 
in a national convention, a young negro from 
Texas second the nomination of a party leader 
with a fervor and in terms that might befit an 
archangel. The play of fancy about Pike's 
Peak was comparable with it, not in eloquence, 
perhaps, but certainly in a pitch which made 
both speeches memorable as gems of unstudied 
humor 

From Thursday afternoon, when I left 
Omaha, until Saturday evening, I walked as 
far as Columbus, then rested over Sunday. 
On Monday morning the course was still the 
line of the Union Pacific, which had now 
turned southwestward in following the bank of 
the river. 

Tuesday's march was the longest that I had 
made so far. From a point near Clarksville I 
went to one a little beyond Grand Island, 
which was, I judged, about forty miles in all; 
but as various lifts had carried me quite a fifth 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 105 

of the way, the actual walking was not much 
above the normal amount. 

On Wednesday morning, August 24th, my 
funds were low. I saw the way to a dinner in 
the middle of the day, but to no supper or bed 
at night. Settling down to work would now 
be a welcome change, however, after hard 
walking, just as I always found the life of the 
road a grateful relief, at first, from the strain 
of heavy labor. 

After dinner I began to think of something 
to do. It would be easy to apply for work 
upon some of the many farms that I was pass- 
ing, and not difficult to find it, I fancied, from 
the reports of the farmers with whom I had 
talked on the road from Omaha. Still, I had 
had a little experience as a farm-hand and I 
wished to extend the range of the experiment 
as far as I could within the limits of unskilled 
labor, so I thought again. 

I was a little beyond the town of Gibbon. 
It was a hot August afternoon, and glancing 
down the line I saw a gang of section-hands at 
work, the air rising in quivering heat-waves 
about them, and the glint of the sunshine on 



106 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

the rails. "When I reached them I could 
easily pick out the boss, a white-haired, smooth- 
shaven, ruddy Irishman with a clear blue eye, 
and, as it proved, a tongue as genial as it was 
coarse. Two of his sons were of the gang, well- 
grown lads, scarcely out of their teens, dark, 
good-looking, and reserved. He told me that 
they were his sons, and he gave me much in- 
formation besides; for my applying for a job 
had been a signal to the whole gang to quit 
work and soberly chew the cud of the situa- 
tion, while the old man gossiped. The fourth 
hand was a slovenly youth, who stood content- 
edly leaning on his shovel and listening idly to 
what was said. 

]STo, the boss could not give me work; he 
already had the full number of men, but he 
knew that the gang of the next section to the 
west was short a man when he saw them last, 
and he thought that my chance of employment 
with them was good. 

I walked something more than three miles 
into the next section, which was the Thirty- 
second, before I came up with the gang that 
worked it. They were three men when I 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 107 

found them and they were bracing the sleepers 
near a little station which is known as Buda. 
I went up to them and asked for Osborn, the 
boss, and was answered by a tall, frank-eyed 
young Westerner of unmistakable native 
birth. 

Osborn owned at once to being short-handed 
and said that I might go to work next morn- 
ing, if I wished, and then went on, in business- 
like fashion, to explain that the wages were 
twelve and a half cents an hour for ten hours' 
work and that his wife would board me for 
three dollars and a half a week. 

" Very well," I said, " I'll take the job." 

" You can go right over to the house," he 
went on, " or wait here and go home with us at 
six o'clock." 

I much preferred to wait and leave explana- 
tions to the boss, for my attempts at explaining 
myself to the women folk of my employers 
had not always ended in leaving me perfectly 
at ease. 

The present situation could be taken in at a 
glance. Four miles farther on the road was 
the town of Kearney, built out, for the most 



108 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

part, to the north of the line. The station at 
Buda was the conventional frame building, 
with a pen for cattle at one end and a fenced 
platform for transferring the stock to the 
cattle-cars. A siding ran for a hundred yards 
or more beside the main line, and a few steps 
beyond it and across the main travelled road 
was the section-boss's shanty, a lightly built 
wooden shell, unpainted and weather-stained. 
Near an end of the siding, with a few feet of 
rails spanning the distance between, stood a 
little structure not unlike an overgrown ken- 
nel, where the hand-car for the men and the 
section tools were housed. For a space about 
the station and the boss's shanty and on either 
side the railway and the road it was clear, then 
began the inevitable corn that stood full-grown 
on the prairie as far as the eye could see. 

The shadow of the station lay across the 
high prairie grass under its eastern wall, and 
there I lay down to rest. 

If I had failed of work at Buda, I should 
have thought little of it and should have 
walked on as a matter of course to further 
search in Kearney or in the country about the 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 109 

town. But having found a job and knowing 
that I had only to rest until going to work in 
the morning, there came a feeling of languor 
which it was a luxury to indulge. As I lay 
there in the high prairie grass at the end of an- 
other stretch of nearly 200 miles of walking, 
and looked dreamily up at the sky and thought 
contentedly of my new post, every muscle re- 
laxed, and the will to summon them to action 
seemed gone, until the mere thought of further 
effort for that day was an agony which one 
harbored for the edge it gave to the sense of 
ease. 

It was difficult to respond even to a call to 
supper. But I got to my feet at six o'clock 
and joined the gang, and together, after stor- 
ing the tools, we walked over to the boss's 
shanty. On a bench outside the kitchen-door 
were tin basins and soap and water, with the 
usual roller towel, and soon we were waiting 
for a summons to the evening meal. 

Already I was much attracted by Osborn 
and the section-hands. Tyler was a young 
American, a long-limbed youth with clear 
smooth muscles and an intelligent, expressive 



110 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

face that suggested breeding, while Sullivan 
was a full-faced, stocky Irishman, of five- 
and-twenty, ready and frank, and full of 
energy. 

The shop that they talked as we waited out- 
side was still the topic at the table when we 
were called to supper in the little front room 
of the cabin with its wooden walls papered 
with old journals. Never had I been adopted 
more naturally by any company of fellow- 
workmen. They asked my name and where I 
was from, and having learned that I had come 
from the East, they appeared satisfied with the 
account of myself and made me one of their 
number with perfect friendliness. Osborn's 
father, a quiet old farmer, joined us, but we 
saw the women and children only as we passed 
through the kitchen. Osborn's mother was 
there with her daughter-in-law and in one or 
other of them, perhaps in both, there was a 
singularly good cook and housekeeper. 

One could see instantly the cleanliness of 
the house for all its shabbiness, and the supper 
to which we sat down was not only clean, but 
bountiful and good. We had soup and boiled 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 111 

chicken, with rich gravy, and potatoes and 
steaming green corn, besides white bread of 
the rarest and a sauce for dessert. I looked 
with a livelier interest at the women as we 
passed out, and I saw in the elder one a serene, 
sweet-faced, old farmer's wife, so trim and 
neat that she might have stepped from a New 
England country side, while the younger wo- 
man, in her abounding vigor, appeared rather 
a product of the West. 

Osborn and Tyler had turned the talk at 
supper to something that attracted them to 
Kearney for the evening, and almost immedi- 
ately when the meal was ended they hitched 
an Indian pony that was Osborn's to a light, 
rickety sulky and drove to town. Sullivan 
and I were left alone, for the old farmer had 
disappeared. We lit our pipes and sat down 
in the prairie grass with our eyes to the sunset. 
The horizon was aglow with crimson and gold 
that faded to a clear, cold green before chang- 
ing to the purple in which the evening star 
was set. The keen gleam of electrics flashed 
out over the town, and a breeze rustled faintly 
among the crisping blades of corn. 



112 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

Sullivan and I sat smoking lazily in the twi- 
light. He had begun to tell me about himself, 
and my spirits were rising, for it was no fur- 
bished tale that I heard. 

There is little marvel in leading men to talk 
of themselves, and workingmen are no excep- 
tion; but there is a difference, which is all the 
difference in the world, between a narrative 
that is evidently inspired by the hope of im- 
pressing you, and one that is a spontaneous self- 
revelation. 

Sullivan was such another waif as Farrell, 
but older, and with not so fair a chance of set- 
tling ever into the framework of conventional 
living. Twice he had crossed the Atlantic as 
a deck-hand on a cattle-ship, and, therefore, he 
knew the nether depths of depravity, but he 
boasted nothing of his knowledge. Once 
only, there came into his voice a note of exul- 
tation. It was at the end of an account of a 
thirty days' term that he once served in the 
Bridewell, at Chicago. The description was 
admirable, for the memory of it was strong 
upon him, and he unconsciously made you see 
the prison and the keepers, and the flocking of 



tJNIOtf PACIFIC RAILWAY 113 

the prisoners into the inner court in the morn- 
ing, each from his separate cell. 

" They knowed me there for Cuckoo Sul- 
livan/' he said, " which was the name the cops 
in Chicago give me; and I guess they'd know 
yet who you was after, if you asked at the 
Harrison Street Station for Cuckoo Sullivan." 

We moved presently to a little platform 
near the line and were sitting on the steps 
smoking contentedly while there came to us 
the soughing of the night air in the corn. 
Sullivan was telling me of a long stay in Okla- 
homa and the Indian Territory, of the wild 
days of the opening of the reservation, and 
wilder days, when, with other adventurers, he 
roamed the new lands and lived at give and 
take with strange fortune. He told me of his 
loves, and they were many and some of them 
were dusky; and of the fights that he had 
fought, not all of them good ; and how, finally, 
he had drifted north again as far as Scotia, 
Neb., and had worked there as a section-hand 
before coming to Buda. 

Sullivan and I were friends when we turned 
in that night to our cots in the attic under the 



114 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

shanty roof. Next morning Osborn paired us 
as partners, when the day's work began. On 
the stroke of seven we four opened the tool- 
house and loaded the car with the crowbars 
and wrenches and picks and shovels that would 
be needed, then placing our dinner pails on 
top, we ran the car out to the line and lifted it 
into position. 

Twenty years earlier our predecessors, who 
laid the line and who used the same tool-house, 
took with them each a rifle every day in readi- 
ness for attacks of Indians. The worn sockets 
and rests were still to be seen, where the rifles 
had stood at night against an inner wall. Giv- 
ing the car a start in the direction of Kearney 
we jumped aboard, and each taking a handle 
of the crank, we were soon flying over the rails. 
The sun was obscured, the early morning air 
was cool, and the rapid movement exhilarat- 
ing, so that the first impression of the job 
was a jolly one. But pumping a hand-car is 
not the whole of a navvy's work. Soon we 
reached the western end of our section, where 
there met us on their car the gang of the sec- 
tion next our own. Osborn had some talk 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 115 

with the other boss about certain details of the 
work, then lifting the car from the line, we 
settled to the day's task. Osborn and Tyler 
worked together and Sullivan and I. Sul- 
livan seemed not to mind having a green hand 
to break in, for he set about it with energy and 
not a little skill. There were sunken sleepers 
that had to be raised and tamped, and new 
coupling bars put in to replace those that had 
split, and spikes to be driven where the old 
ones were loose, and nuts to be tightened that 
were working free of their bolts. 

Five hours on end of this were fatiguing; it 
was the drill, drill of rough manual labor, but 
with the difference of some variety, and there 
could not have been a better partner than Sul- 
livan. He taught me how to tamp about the 
sleepers and put the new bars in place and 
tighten the nuts, but the noon signal was wel- 
come as we heard it sounded by the steam whis- 
tles in Kearney. 

We joined Osborn and Tyler then, and tak- 
ing our dinner-pails from the hand-car, we all 
sat down in the prairie grass, settling ourselves 
to an hour of keen enjoyment. Slices of bread 



116 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

and cold meat and a bit of sausage and a piece 
of pie and cheese with cold tea, made up each 
man's ration and laid the foundation for a 
smoke. Kough hand labor is always hard, 
however trained to it one's muscles may have 
been, and ten hours of it daily are apt to have 
a deadening effect upon the mind, and time 
drags heavily to the end. Yet, when the 
nooning is reached, or the day's work is done, 
there come with meat and drink a feeling of 
renewal that others cannot know as working- 
men know it, and a solace in tobacco that is 
the very lap of ease. 

As we lay there in the prairie grass, our eyes 
following, dreamily, the smoke as it curled in 
the warm sunlight, the talk drifting aimlessly, 
eddying now and then about a topic that held 
it for a moment, then flowing free again. 
Once it came my way. 

" When you was living East, did you ever 
go to New York? " asked the boss. 

" Yes, quite often," I said. 

" Was you ever in Wall Street? " 

" Many times." 

" Well, that's where them " (I omit the in- 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 117 

trevening qualifying terms) " bloated bond- 
holders lives that we poor devils out here has 
to work for." 

It was not worth while to explain that Wall 
Street is not a residence quarter, but the state- 
ment had an interest of its own, and so I 
probed the boss for what lay under it. There 
was nothing, apparently, beyond a vague sense 
of injustice which had bred a feeling of hatred 
for a class that the Free Silver agitation had 
taught him to call " money lords." These 
were a company of men who had got control 
of the " money market " and lived, conse- 
quently, in much splendor, in Wall Street, at 
the expense of the " producing classes," which 
appeared to consist solely of those who work 
with their hands on their own account or for 
day's wages. 

The idea would have been not in the least 
surprising had it come from a fellow-laborer 
in a town, where some wave of well-defined 
revolutionary agitation might have touched 
him, but coming from a native-born farmer's 
son, grown to a section-boss, it served to deepen 
the wonder that one felt in finding so often 



118 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

among an agrarian population the beginnings 
of revolutionary doctrine. 

Sullivan did not share the boss's views. 
" Money lords " and " the producing classes " 
were but idle words to him. Life was a mat- 
ter of working or loafing. If you labored 
with your hands, yours was the bondage of 
work; if not, you had escaped the primal curse. 
His philosophy was luminous in a single sen- 
tence while we were at work in the afternoon. 

It was late in the day, but still very hot, for 
the clouds had melted in the morning and the 
sun gained in strength as the day passed, and 
no breeze came to stir the sweltering air. We 
were employed now near the eastern end of 
the section, where some regrading was neces- 
sary because of weakening in the road-bed. 
Sullivan and I were together as before. It 
was pick and shovel labor, and, because of 
some earlier experience, I did not need much 
coaching, so that we were working in silence 
for the most part, except that Sullivan now 
and then would burst into song. But his 
snatches of song grew rarer as the afternoon 
wore away and as the muscles in our backs pro- 



UNION PACIFIC EAILWAY 119 

tested the more against the continued strain. 
With leaden feet the minutes plodded slowly 
past, sixty minutes to the hour and five hours 
of unbroken toil. Like Joshua's moon at 
Ajalon, the sun seemed to stand at gaze, and, 
from the mid-western sky, transfixed us with 
his heat. Five o'clock came, and the next 
hour stretched before us in almost intolerable 
length. For some time Sullivan had been 
silent, drudging doggedly on. Now, I saw 
him draw himself slowly erect, rubbing with 
one hand, meanwhile, the small of his back, 
while his face expressed comically the pain he 
felt, and then he said, and I wish that I could 
suggest the rich Irish brogue with which he 
said it: 

" Ach, I'm that sorry that I didn't study for 
the ministry." 

Two days later the gang from the next sec- 
tion to the east joined us in the afternoon, and 
together we put in a new " frog " in the switch 
near the Buda station. They were the Irish 
boss with his two sons and the taciturn hand of 
the farm-laborer type. The boss remembered 
me instantly and commented favorably on my 



120 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

having taken his advice in applying to Osborn 
for a job. 

The point of our joining forces was in the 
necessity of laying the frog without interfer- 
ing with traffic. Osborn had chosen the hour 
in the day when there was the longest interval 
between trains, and we had everything in 
readiness when, at the appointed time, the 
other gang met us, so that with our united 
labor the frog was in place and secure when 
the next train passed. 

Much of the talk between the bosses at this 
time referred to a later meeting, when, on an 
appointed day, the gangs for many miles along 
the line were to foregather at Grand Island 
under the Division-Superintendent's orders- 
There was to be a general distribution then of 
new sleepers along the railway. 

What interested me most at the moment 
was the tone of the men in speaking of their 
superior in the service. I had caught it fre- 
quently in earlier references to the Superin- 
tendent among ourselves. He was the official 
in command of all the section-gangs in the di- 
vision and directly responsible for the condi- 
tion of the road. 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 121 

The men told me that he had been a section- 
hand himself and then a boss, and that he had 
worked his way to the position of superinten- 
dent in a long service with the company. The 
feeling that they bore him was one of admira- 
tion, not unmixed with fear. They respected 
his knowledge of every detail of their work, 
and a certain liking for him grew out of the 
fact of his having been a laborer like them- 
selves, but they feared him with an awesome 
fear. 

I remember his passing one afternoon while 
we were at work. We had stood aside at the 
coming of a freight train, and, as we stepped 
back to our work, we caught sight of a wiry 
little man standing on the rear platform of 
the caboose, his hands clasping the railing and 
his eyes intent on the road-bed. Osborn 
thought that he saw the flutter of a piece of 
paper in the dust raised by the passing train, 
and suspecting that it was an order for himself, 
he dropped his tools and searched the embank- 
ment, and even the neighboring cornfield to 
the leeward, with an eagerness that might have 
marked a hunt for hid treasure. He could 



122 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

find nothing, however, and for the rest of the 
day, and I know not for how much longer, 
the incident was upon his mind with a sense 
of keen anxiety. 

When the day appointed for distributing the 
sleepers came, we boarded at Buda an east- 
bound passenger train, and were pressed into 
a smoking-car already overcrowded by bosses 
and section-hands. Osborn vouched for us to 
the conductor, as the other bosses did for their 
men when we picked up a gang at almost every 
station. 

It was a welcome escape to get off at 
Grand Island. Like boys set free from school 
we clambered over the long freight-train, laden 
with sleepers, that stood waiting for us on a 
siding. Our orders were perfectly clear. 
We were to distribute ourselves through the 
train and, at a given signal, to unlade the 
sleepers as fast as we could, throwing them 
along the road-bed well free of the line. Each 
man was to remember, moreover, that, at the 
end of his own section, he was to leave the 
train. 

I found myself in a box-car with three other 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 123 

navvies, all strangers to me. Sleepers lay 
piled to the roof from end to end of the floor, 
with only a passage across the middle wide 
enough for us to begin the work. A blue- 
eyed young Swede and I had just agreed to be 
partners when the Superintendent passed in 
his way along the train, noting the number of 
men in each car. 

In a few moments we were off, and we had 
not gone far before the prearranged signal 
came. Then we bent to the work with a will. 
It was a break in the regular routine and we 
took it as a lark. Two men attacked one side 
of the passage and the Swede and I the other. 
Soon it was a race between us to see which 
could unload the faster. 

The train moved slowly, discharging sleep- 
ers that piled themselves in grotesque confu- 
sion along the sides of the embankment, while 
above the noise of the cars, rose the voices of 
the men as they shouted excitedly in the un- 
wonted rivalry. 

Before I realized that we had gone half so 
far, I caught sight of the Buda station. Our 
car was nearly empty, and as nearly empty at 



124 A SECTION-HAND ON THE 

our end as at the other, the Swede and I 
thought, but our fellow-navvies claimed a vic- 
tory when, at the end of the section, I jumped 
to the ground with much care to avoid the fly- 
ing sleepers. Osborn was there, and soon the 
other members of the gang gathered, and then 
we returned to the usual work until six o'clock. 

For two weeks or more I remained at work 
on this section, then I knew that I must be 
going; for the autumn was at hand, and I 
aimed to cross the Eockies and reach the 
milder climate of the Southwest by the be- 
ginning of winter. But the actual parting 
with the gang presented the usual embarrass- 
ments. I had become used to the men, and 
they to me, and we worked together har- 
moniously and were on terms of easiest friend- 
liness. Besides, no one had appeared who 
would take my place, and there were many 
sleepers to be laid. 

I always stipulated with my employers at 
the beginning of an engagement that I wished 
to be free to go when I pleased, as they were 
free to discharge me when they wished, but 
this rarely smoothed the way of going, for they 



UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY 125 

lost sight of the agreement as they grew accus- 
tomed to me as a hand. 

When I told Osborn one evening that I 
must be gone in a day or two, his eyes took on 
a look of perplexity that did not relieve my em- 
barrassment, and he began to plead the press- 
ure of the work and the difficulty of getting 
section-hands until I felt like a deserter. But 
there was no help for it, and early one Septem- 
ber morning, after reluctant good-byes to the 
family and the men, I set off down the line 
with my wages in one pocket and in another a 
luncheon that the boss's mother put up for me. 

When the sun was setting that evening, I 
had entered a region where the cornfields were 
fewer, where the cattle country had begun, 
and the alkali shone white in the soil, and the 
bones of dead cattle lay bleaching on the plain. 



"A BURRO-PUNCHER 



"A BURRO-PUNCHER" 

MIKE PRICE was a prospector by nat- 
ure ; his prospecting through the sum- 
mer and autumn of 1892 in the Wagon 
Wheel Gap country of southwestern Colo- 
rado was a mere incident in a long career. 
Phoenix, Ariz., was his head-quarters, and he 
would fain return there for the Indian sum- 
mer of its winter climate; for he hated snow 
and the hard cold of the Rocky Mountain 
camps, where, as he said, a man must hibernate 
until spring. But Phoenix was the best part 
of 600 miles away across a thinly settled fron- 
tier. Burros and blankets and food for the 
journey were to be had only for ready money, 
and Price had not " struck it rich "; indeed, 
he had not struck it at all. One after another 
the parts of his camping outfit had gone into 
a pawnbroker's shop at Creede, in the progress 

of a luckless season, until the late autumn 
129 



130 



found him without burro or blanket or bacon, 
and bereft even of the " gun " (a six-shooter) 
which General had given him in rec- 
ognition of his services as a scout. 

It was late November when I met him, and 
Price was making a precarious living at odd 
jobs for civil engineers. One of these was my 
friend Hamilton, who had known Price for 
years and who proved himself a friend in need 
to both of us, for he brought us together and 
proposed the journey which took us to Phcenix, 
and which gave me six weeks' experience as a 
" burro-puncher." 

You could trust Hamilton to find a way out. 
There is scarcely a phase of frontier life that 
he did not know from personal experience, 
and he saw at a glance that Price's position and 
my own would exactly complement each other 
in furthering a plan which was common to us 
both. Price wanted to reach Phoenix, and so 
did I; he knew the way but was without the 
means of travel, while I, knowing nothing of 
the country, yet had some store of savings. 

Wages were high at Creede. The miners 
were getting $3, and I, as an unskilled laborer, 



131 



working with a gang that was cutting a road 
down Bachelor Mountain from the New York 
Chance Mine to Creede, was paid $2.50 a day. 
Our board and lodging cost us $7 a week, but 
they were worth it, and, even at that rate, 
there remained a considerable margin for pos- 
sible saving. 

Hamilton knew my plans ; he was one of the 
few whom I had told, in the course of my wan- 
dering, of the object of the expedition. We 
had been spending an evening with a company 
of kindred Bohemians at the house of a mine 
superintendent, and were returning together 
to his quarters in the quiet of two o'clock in 
the morning through a world white with the 
first snow of winter and dazzling under a full 
moon. 

I had money enough to take me to Phoenix 
by rail, and it seemed the height of folly to go 
in any other way, so I began to explain why I 
wished to walk and why I had already walked 
most of the way from the Atlantic. Hamil- 
ton listened patiently, but without interest, I 
thought, until abruptly he turned upon me 
with approval, immeasurably beyond my de- 



132 



sert, yet showing so sympathetic an insight 
into the possible service of such work, that I 
saw again, as by a flash, the rich human qual- 
ity that had already endeared the man. 

" And so you worked with the road gang 
on Bachelor Mountain to get enough to grub 
stake you to Phoenix? " he said, and he 
laughed aloud. Then he swore — deeply, res- 
onantly, and from the heart. 

Price was sent for on the next day, and, in 
the afternoon, he turned up in Hamilton's 
office, a dark, bearded, keen-eyed Irishman, 
slender and wiry, and all alert at the prospect 
of getting back to " God's country," which in 
his phrase meant Arizona. Soon, not merely 
Hamilton and I, but our friends the barrister 
and the editor and the grave mine superinten- 
dent were involved in preparation for the trip. 
We accompanied Price to the pawnbroker's 
shop, where he identified his belongings, and I 
redeemed them. Then we all set about select- 
ing additional blankets and a fresh store of 
food. 

Our pack animals could not have carried 
their loads, had we taken all that was pressed 



133 



upon us for the journey. Price borrowed a 
shot-gun from the private arsenal that was put 
at our disposal, and I a six-shooter, and we 
gladly accepted gifts of tobacco until our pock- 
ets were bursting with plenty. 

Weird as it was, our little caravan was but 
the typical prospector's outfit as we moved in 
single file through the winding street of the 
mining camp, an object of interest only to the 
four friends who bade us good-by with many 
slaps on the back and with affectionate oaths. 
Price was mounted on his Indian pony and I 
on Sacramento, a burro of uncommon size, 
w T hile our effects were packed on the backs of 
two other burros, Beecher and California by 
name, with two of California's foals trotting 
abreast as a running accompaniment to the 
show. 

Past the shops and saloons and dance-halls 
and hotels we wound our way on among the 
frail shanties at the outskirts of the camp, until 
we struck the wagon trail that led southward 
through a ranching country in the direction 
of the pass over the mountain to Durango. 
Snow lay lightly on the ground; vast tracts, 



134 "a burro-puncher " 

however, had been swept clear by the wind, so 
that ours was an unobstructed course, except 
where we had to plough through occasional 
drifts, which our animals did with ease, tossing 
the feathery flakes until they flashed again in 
the clear sunlight of a frosty morning. The 
burros were at their best, keeping the trail at 
a steady pace that never hinted at the habit of 
wandering. Price was high-spirited at the 
thought of Phoenix, and, between snatches of 
song, he regaled me with the glories of the 
Indian summer which we should find across 
the range. I could well share his light-heart- 
edness. As far as Creede I had walked alone, 
picking the way with ease, but, between Creede 
and Phoenix, there lay a stretch of the fast- 
fading frontier which I longed to cross on foot, 
yet knew that I could not without a guide. 
And here, as by miracle, one had appeared in 
the person of Price, who knew the land and 
them that dwelt therein, and who was more 
than guide in being a philosopher and friend. 
The keen air quickened our blood, as we 
breathed deep of its rarefied purity and felt the 
mild warmth of the winter sun like the glow 



" A burro-puncher" 135 

of rising spirits. The mountain-peaks rose 
white and still above the dark ruling of the 
timber line, yet radiant in the light, and serene 
in a peace that passeth knowledge; and the 
head waters of the Eio Grande swept past us 
in streams that were dark against the snow, but 
ablaze where they reflected the sun. 

It was long past noon before I thought of 
stopping, and then I found that there were to 
be no mid-day stops on this expedition, for the 
days were so short that camp had to be made 
between four and five in the afternoon, and, as 
it was difficult to get started in the morning 
much before eight o'clock, we could give at 
the best but little more than eight hours in the 
day to travel. 

For some time that afternoon we had been 
in the shadow of a mountain to the west, and 
the light was fading fast, when, as we rose 
upon a knoll above the stream whose bed we 
were ascending, Price saw that it was a good 
camping-ground, and the caravan came to a 
halt. Wood was abundant about us, so that 
water was soon boiling, and slices cut from a 
frozen shoulder of beef were presently frying 



136 



in the saucepan, while the tea drew to a fearful 
strength at the fire's edge. After supper and 
a smoke, we made ready our bed. An old 
piece of canvas, some seven feet by fourteen, 
was first spread upon level ground; then we ar- 
ranged upon half of it all the gunny-sacks that 
we had brought as cushions for the pack-sad- 
dles. These formed a mattress, over which 
we spread our blankets, drawing up finally the 
unused half of the canvas as a top covering. 
Going to bed consisted simply of taking off our 
boots and folding our coats for pillows, then 
disappearing with all speed under the blankets, 
with the canvas drawn well over our heads to 
keep out the bitter night cold of that altitude 
in late November. Our animals browsed near 
the camp, the bells about their necks tinkling 
as they moved, until they, too, found shelter 
and settled down to rest. 

When I wakened it was from deepest sleep, 
and I looked out from under cover for some 
sign of day, but there was none. The stars 
were shining undimmed, with the effect of near- 
ness which brought back vividly an illusion of 
childhood. Nothing in their position gave me 



" A burro-puncher" 137 

a hint of the time, but Price, on waking, saw at 
a glance that the dawn was near. Scarcely 
was the fire lit and water put on to boil before 
the dark bulks of the mountains to the east 
were clear cut against a brightening sky. 
Breakfast over and the dishes washed, we had 
a smoke and, having fed the animals from a 
little store of grain, we saddled and packed 
them for the day's march. 

Nothing in the previous day's experience 
suggested the rigor of this afternoon's prog- 
ress. All went prosperously in the morning, 
for we were still following the wagon trail, and 
the burros kept it as by instinct. Only the 
snow was deepening, which was a reminder of 
the warnings we received in Creede that we 
were attempting the pass dangerously late in 
the year. "What with snow and the loss of 
leaves, the " look " of the region had so far 
changed since Price passed that way in spring 
that, with small wonder, he could not find the 
lead of the foot-trail that crosses the Divide. 
Again and again we struck in to the left only 
to discover presently that we were following a 
false lead, until Price, impatient of further 



138 

dallying, boldly led the way in an ascent of a 
trackless mountain whose farther side, he 
knew, would disclose the lost trail. 

A long, steep climb by a well-trodden way is 
difficult at the best for pack animals, but we 
were now in a forest with the course obstruct- 
ed by undergrowth and the trunks of fallen 
trees, and the uncertain footing covered with 
treacherous snow. The burros took it splen- 
didly from the first, straining their muscles in 
a toilsome climb that was doubly hard because 
of its obstacles. But as the hours passed and 
the way grew more difficult, their strength be- 
gan to fail. Then came long resting spells, 
followed by spurts of frantic climbing. 
Again and again we seemed to be nearing the 
top, only to find the crest of a ridge with an- 
other summit towering far beyond. Present- 
ly the burros were falling from sheer fatigue. 
With a few yards of upward struggle, down 
they would sink exhausted, and, after letting 
them rest, Price and I had our hands full in 
dragging them to their feet again. 

It was nearing sunset when we gained the 
top, and, once there, all our troubles vanished. 



139 

We passed from the cover of the wood out 
upon a treeless slope, swept clear of snow and 
covered by the past summer's growth of grass, 
brown and dry and excellent fodder. A 
stream flowed through the natural meadow, 
and on a ledge above it, as plain as day, was 
the winding trail making off in the direction 
of the Divide. We gratefully camped there 
that night, while our tired beasts gorged them- 
selves with grass. 

Whatever the difficulties of crossing were 
to be, we were clearly not to be hampered by 
foul weather. The night was as still and cold 
as the last had been, and the morning again 
was cloudless. We were up by starlight as 
before, and the camp-fire was sending volleys 
of glowing sparks into the surrounding dark- 
ness when the signs of dawn appeared. I 
went to the brook for water and was back just 
in time to see the sunrise from the camp. We 
were in a narrow valley that stretched south- 
westward in an upward trend toward the sum- 
mit of the range. From its northeastern open- 
ing we could see far over a confused mass of 
mountains whose outlines grew clearer in the 



140 



return of day. With infinite majesty the 
light streamers flung themselves across the sky, 
paling the bright stars; and, when a distant 
snow-peak caught the first clear ray, all the 
others seemed to lift their heads in an ecstasy 
of praise and welcome. In another moment 
the eastern wall of our valley was fringed by 
a tracery of fire, where level beams shone 
through the trees which stood out against the 
sky. And last, upon us in the depth of the 
valley, the sun rose, prodigal of his splendor 
and of his gifts of light and life. 

I had left Price squatting near the fire with 
his face to the east as he cut slices of bacon into 
a saucepan. On my return from the brook I 
found him still sitting there, but grown oblivi- 
ous to bacon. His forearms were resting on 
his knees, while loosely in one hand he held a 
knife and a piece of bacon in the other. From 
under an old felt hat, long, black, matted hair 
fell upon his neck and mingled with a dark, 
unkempt beard. His face, blackened by the 
smoke of the camp-fire, was lifted to the east- 
ern sky, and his eyes were on the sunrise. 
Such a look, transfixed with reverence and 



141 



wonder, seemed to link him with some early 
epoch of the race, when the sense of power and 
beauty awoke in man ; and as he drew himself 
erect without lifting his eyes from the scene 
before him, " It's not strange," he remarked, 
" that men have worshipped the sun." 

The snow grew deeper with every mile of 
the march that morning. We were nearing 
the Divide, and one evidence of it was the 
piercing wind that blew down the gorge. 'Not 
since the morning of the first day out had 
either of us ridden; for the animals had as 
much as they could do to carry themselves and 
their packs, and now we found that we must 
help them by opening a path through the 
snow. It lay a foot deep before us, then two 
feet and more as we mounted the Divide, so 
that Price and I were soon alternating in the 
work of breaking a way. One of us would 
plunge through until fagged out, then the 
other would take his place in treading down 
the drift, and so we forged ahead, a few yards 
at a time, wet to the skin with melting snow 
and cut to the bone by the wind. 

I do not know how far we travelled that 



142 "a burro-puncher" 

day; it could not have been many miles, and 
I do not care to think of possible consequences, 
had we been overtaken by a storm, instead of 
having the fairest possible winter weather. 
But we put in more than eight hours of con- 
tinuous work and were repaid in the late 
afternoon by reaching camping-ground on the 
western side of the Divide, almost as good as 
that which we found for the night before. 

The next day's, Tuesday's, march was one 
that dwells delightfully in memory — not for 
any element of excitement, but for the simple 
joy of it. All day we descended by a trail that 
wound through canon after canon, crossing 
and recrossing the streams whose waters were 
flowing toward the Pacific, as those of the day 
before were to find a final outlet in the At- 
lantic. It was cold, but it seemed like spring 
in contrast with the day before, for the sun 
shone bright, and birds were in the trees, and 
here and there the snow had melted, giving 
to the soil the suggestion of returning life. 

The burros plainly shared the feeling of re- 
lief in reaching a more passable region, and 
the art of burro-punching began, consequent- 



143 



ly, to disclose its difficulties. From one side 
and then the other of the trail they would 
break away in all directions, exploring the sur- 
rounding country, never with an air of mis- 
chief, but always with a sober, dogged per- 
versity that was the more exasperating because 
it wore a mask of reason. Once back into the 
trail, they might keep it faultlessly for miles 
on end, and then, from no apparent cause, be- 
gin once more to wander. They were most 
difficult to manage at the fords. Generally 
they scattered to the four winds at the first 
approach to water, and when we had cor- 
ralled them again and forced them down to 
the brink, they would stand calmly, planted 
ankle-deep in the stream, resolutely deter- 
mined not to move. It was then that Price 
gave vent to real profanity, and I am bound to 
own that it was effective. When beating and 
prodding and the milder invective failed to 
urge the burros forward, Price would stand 
back, pale with rage, and begin to swear, call- 
ing upon all his gods and blasting the reputa- 
tions of his beasts unto the third and fourth 
generation of their ancestors. By some subtle 



144 



perception they seemed to understand that this 
meant business, and slowly at first, but pres- 
ently, as though they rather enjoyed the water, 
they waded through and started down the trail 
beyond. 

We camped that night in a narrow canon 
whose level bed was well grown with trees and 
walled by scarped cliffs, which rose sheer above 
it. Price said that it formed a miniature 
Yosemite, and certainly it made good camp- 
ing-ground; for with plenty of wood and 
water, it was well protected from the wind, 
and we slept there in great comfort. But our 
fare was growing monotonous. We soon ex- 
hausted the supply of beef and had since been 
living upon bacon and bread, so that we heart- 
ily welcomed the sight of a ranchman's cabin 
near the end of the next day's march, for there 
we purchased a peck of potatoes and thus en- 
larged our bill of fare to bacon and " spuds " 
and bread and gravy. 

Thanksgiving-day was celebrated by faring 
sumptuously in the evening and sleeping un- 
der cover. And it was the more delightful cel- 
ebration for being wholly unpremeditated. 



145 



There was no prospect through the day of any- 
thing but the usual march and camp in the 
open at night. We were plainly in a more 
populous region, for we had struck a wagon- 
trail again, and repeatedly, in the morning, we 
met farm wagons laden with solemn families 
in Sunday dress. As the afternoon wore on 
we grew hungrier for thinking of Thanksgiv- 
ing dinners. At dusk we were passing a 
ranch upon which the hay presses had just 
ceased working for the day. A little farther 
down the road we overtook two men who were 
about to enter a wooden building, which 
proved to be a deserted school-house. Price 
hailed them and they turned, standing in the 
open door. Practised as he was in the ameni- 
ties of the frontier, it took him no time to 
strike up an acquaintance, and soon we were 
bade welcome to share the school-house as a 
camping-place. 

Our hosts were a young American frontiers- 
man and his " partner," an Indian, who to- 
gether had a contract for pressing hay on the 
neighboring ranch, and who were living mean- 
while in this deserted building. Having 



146 



admitted us, they completed their welcome by 
doing everything in their power for our com- 
fort. They arranged with the owner to past- 
ure our animals on the ranch for the night, 
and showed us where to find wood for a fire 
and where on the floor to spread our bed. 
And when the evening meal was ready, they 
proposed that we should club together, giving 
us of their fresh meat and roasted Indian corn 
and steaming hot bread in exchange for our 
" spuds " and bacon. But we had some chance 
of making return, for they had no tobacco to 
compare with ours, and far into the night we 
sat talking, over pipes fragrant of good weed. 

Price and I were making progress in ac- 
quaintance, and every day I had fresh cause 
for self-congratulation at my extraordinary 
luck in having fallen in with so good a guide. 
Of excellent Irish family, Price was not with- 
out education and a taste for letters, although 
he had chosen, almost as a boy, the career of 
an adventurer on the frontier. And now at 
middle life, having ranged the Southwest as 
few men have done, and having seen all phases 
of its life and shared most of them, he was 



147 



looking forward to further casual living, per- 
fectly content so long as he had a camping 
outfit and could wander as he pleased over the 
face of nature. That some day he would 
" strike it rich " he never doubted — and may 
his faith come true. Meanwhile he was get- 
ting a good deal out of life. Nature in her 
milder moods was a constant solace and a joy 
to him. In long marches through golden Ind- 
ian summer days, he sang and spouted verses 
of his own, and told me veritable Ulysses's 
tales of men and their strange ways. The few 
books which he had read he had made his 
own, for his memory was retentive, and he 
never forgot, apparently, a face or a name, 
so that his progress through the country was 
like a walk about his own neighborhood. 

With the instinctive, gentlemanlike reserve 
of the Western frontiersman, he never ques- 
tioned me about myself; he was far more in- 
terested in what knowledge I might have gath- 
ered, which he could add to his own. Oddly 
enough, it was the little reading that I had 
done in philosophy that seemed to attract him 
most. Many a night when it was mild enough 



148 U A PURRO-PUNCHER " 

to sleep with our heads uncovered we lay side 
by side, " overarched by gorgeous night/' gaz- 
ing into the starry firmament, and I would 
tell him what I could of theories of the uni- 
verse from Thales to Herbert Spencer, feeling 
all the while the tension of his mind as he 
reached out eagerly for these guesses at the 
mystery of things. 

It happened that I had been reading " Con- 
ingsby," at Creede, and Prince slipped the 
copy into his pocket as we left the camp. He 
devoured it by our camp-fires at night. The 
story held him, but most of all he was spell- 
bound by its literary charm, and he added a 
quaint reason for his liking in the remark: 

" You know," he said to me, " Lord Bea- 
consfield was always square with the Irish." 

His national partisanship was of the stanch- 
est, and he had always given to the Irish fund 
when he could; but the outcome of the fight 
in Committee Room "No. 15 had been too much 
for him, and he would stoutly maintain that 
never again, so long as the " traitors " who 
had turned against Parnell were in the ascen- 
dant, would he interest himself in furthering 



149 



Home Rule — threads of vital connection 
which were a little strange, I thought, between 
points so widely severed as St. Stephen's and 
the deserts of Arizona. 

Elsewhere I have already sketched in out- 
line our trip as we walked south together from 
Durango to the San Juan, then through the 
ISTavajo Eeservation to the high plateau of 
northern !New Mexico, where, utterly deserted 
by fair weather, we camped for a week, while 
a cold wave swept over us, forcing the ther- 
mometer down to ten and twelve degrees below 
zero, and nearly freezing us and our animals 
in the still cold of the winter nights. 

Even after we got under way again and 
were making progress southward in the direc- 
tion of the " rimrock " of the Mogollon 
Mountains, persistent ill-luck followed us in 
the shape of almost nightly falls of snow and 
rain, which added nothing to the comfort of 
sleeping on the ground or walking across an al- 
most trackless waste. But if we were disap- 
pointed here, Price's promise of Indian sum- 
mer was abundantly fulfilled when once we 
had waded through the snow in the great 



150 

primeval forests that cover the northern slopes 
of the Mogollons, and made the abrupt de- 
scent of the " rimrock." It was like the con- 
trast of Florida with our Northern winter. 
The live-oak and budding cottonwood and the 
warm sun and sprouting grass gave us royal 
welcome from the cold and snow beyond; and, 
at the end of the first day's journey in this 
region, we came out upon a ranch. It was 
thirty miles to the nearest neighbor, and the 
ranchman and his wife were glad to see any- 
one, even casual " burro-punchers," like Price 
and me. There chanced to be a considerable 
company at the ranch that night. An outfit 
of three men who were hunting mountain lion 
through the range for the sake of the bounty 
on their scalps had come there to camp, bring- 
ing with them the carcass of a bear. And the 
postman, whose beat took him from the Santa 
Fe line southward through some Mormon set- 
tlements and on to scattered ranches north of 
the Tonto Basin, was also quartered there. So 
that we sat down more than a dozen strong to 
dine on bear steak and potatoes and bread and 
coffee; and when dinner was over, Price and 



151 

I again had the good fortune to find that our 
tobacco suited well the taste of the company. 
We were gathered now in the living-room of 
the cabin. Some of the men were seated on 
the floor and others in rough, hand-made chairs 
about a wood fire in a large, open fireplace. 
The talk ranged at random over phases of 
hard living known to such men as these. It 
was varied and rich and sometimes racy. In 
it Price shone as a bright, particular star. 
None had travelled the Southwest so thorough- 
ly as he, or experienced so much of its char- 
acteristic life. Then his native readiness at 
narrative stood him in good stead, and, penni- 
less prospector that he was, he held unchal- 
lenged the centre of the stage. 

The door of the dining-room stood open, 
and, when I had finished my pipe, I joined the 
ranchman's wife, who sat beside the table in a 
rocking-chair, holding in her arms her oldest 
child, a boy of five or six. She seemed glad 
to have someone to talk to. The conversation 
at table had swept from end to end in a man- 
ner diverting to her, but in which she as little 
dreamed of joining as a bird would venture 



152 



with untried wings into a high wind. She 
was too delicately reared to be at home in the 
thickening tobacco-smoke of the living-room 
and so she was alone with the child, the hired 
woman being in the kitchen. I praised the 
country side which she and her husband had 
chosen as their home, and told her how well it 
contrasted with a region only a few miles to 
the north; but, if I found a way to her heart 
at all, it was in genuine admiration of the boy, 
whose light hair rested in moist curls about his 
glowing face, as he lay sleeping in his mother's 
arms. She was not a discontented woman — 
far from it ; she was young, and her eyes shone 
with health and with vital interest in the 
things about her. But it was rarely that she 
saw anyone from the world outside, and I was 
a stranger, and when I owned to having been 
in the Northwest, she told me eagerly that her 
own people and her husband's lived " back east 
in Minnesota," where they both were born and 
bred. 

How can I suggest the pathos of it? She 
was not complaining and yet, as she went on 
telling me of an earlier time, it was almost as 



" A BURRO-PUNCHER M 153 

a captive might have spoken of the wide range 
of living when he was free. Life in constant 
contact with her friends and the breadth of 
their many interests was in such striking con- 
trast to existence on a ranch, with the nearest 
neighbor thirty miles in the offing, and with 
never a look from year to year over the rugged 
hills that formed the horizon. 

One could see at a glance the opposite effects 
of the change upon the two natures. Her hus- 
band, native-born and country-bred, like her- 
self, and schooled as a man must be whose 
bringing up is in a community which draws its 
blood and traditions pure from New England, 
yet had become more a frontiersman every 
year, in whom the memories of earlier things 
faded fast before the dominant realities of his 
new surroundings. She, on the contrary, cher- 
ished these memories of her own — her home 
and friends and church associations and Chau- 
tauqua circle (she told me particularly of that) 
until they were enshrined within her, and one 
could but see that, however loneliness might 
oppress her, she had an escape which must 
have furnished at times an enjoyment keener, 



154 



perhaps, than any which real experience would 
have brought. 

I have forgotten its name, but I think that 
it was known as " Young's Valley," a region 
some distance south of the " rimrock " and 
north of the hills which hem in the Tonto 
Basin. There were several ranches there, and 
a well-defined trail led on, by way of San Reno 
Pass, to Phoenix. When we entered the val- 
ley Price was all for veering off to the south- 
west and reaching Phoenix by the Natural 
Bridge, which he wished me to see. We left 
the trail near the first cabin which we passed 
in the valley, a deserted cabin for the time, and 
struck across the grass-grown hills in search 
of another way. Soon we were in a maze of 
trails; they were leading in every direction, 
but they were cattle-paths, and we came upon 
herds feeding over the winter-brown hills. It 
was a gently rolling country at the first, where 
Price had not the smallest difficulty in steer- 
ing a course ; for, although he had never been 
there before, yet the way had been described 
to him and he had no fear of losing it. Our 
only danger lay, apparently, in exhausting our 



155 



provisions before reaching an inhabited region 
beyond. But we thought little of that, and 
entered light-heartedly enough upon an ex- 
ploration that was new and attractive to us 
both. 

Trouble began with the weakening of our 
burros. We had very little grain when we 
left the Tonto trail, and we counted upon fod- 
der enough from a grazing country. But the 
grass grew thinner as we went, and the lean- 
ness of the cattle attested the leanness of the 
land, until we began to fear that our beasts 
would not have strength enough to pull 
through. Moreover, the country became in- 
creasingly rough, so that the effort of travel 
was the greater. Soon there came a day when 
our animals were weak and tottering under 
their loads, and we ourselves had to begin the 
march on a breakfast of tea and a few boiled 
beans, which exhausted our store. Still Price 
was confident of getting through, and, if the 
burros could hold out, there was prospect of 
plenty by night. 

In the middle of the morning we found ly- 
ing beside the trail a cow that was plainly dy- 



156 



ing. For an hour we worked over her, trying 
to discover evidences of a wound or of a broken 
leg, and trying, too, to ease her pain. I left 
her alive regretfully, but Price advised against 
shooting her. 

Matters grew serious that afternoon. The 
trail became hopelessly lost, so that not even 
Price, with his developed instinct, could find 
it again. "We were in the heart of the hills 
now, with canons opening in strange confusion 
about us. One after another we explored 
them, only to find each a " box-canon " at the 
end. Price was sure that our desired coun- 
try lay just beyond, and it was maddening, 
late in the day, to acknowledge that he could 
find no way out but the one by which we en- 
tered. It was a sorry retreat; hungry and 
worn we went supperless into camp. By rare 
good luck, however, we hit upon camping- 
ground where there was more grass than we 
had seen for some time, and in the morning 
our burros and the pony were comparatively 
revived, fit again for a hard journey. And we 
gave it them. 

Price and I had had nothing to eat for 



u A BURRO-PUNCHER *' 157 

twenty-four hours, and very little then. 
Meanwhile we had heen working hard in keen 
mountain air, and I was so hungry by the time 
that we got back to the cow, now dead beside 
the trail, that I proposed our eating some of 
her. Price quickly put an end to the plan, 
however, not on hygienic grounds, but by ex- 
plaining that the cattlemen, if they found her 
multilated, would conclude that she had been 
killed, and would make matters lively for us in 
consequence, hanging being the not uncom- 
mon penalty for this offence. 

One does not keep close count of days in 
wandering over a frontier, and it was only an 
aggravation of our plight to remember that it 
was not Sunday merely but Christmas-day as 
well. But if Christmas heightened the sense 
of hardship, it furnished an admirable setting 
to its end. By trusting his instinct for a short 
cut, Price brought us out in the middle of the 
afternoon upon open hills, from which we not 
only saw a section of Young's Valley, but, ris- 
ing clear from the middle of it, a column of 
blue smoke from the chimney of a ranchman's 
cabin. We wasted no time in covering the in- 



158 



tervening miles and then we lifted, light-heart- 
edly, the latch of the road-gate and, with the 
easy assurance of the frontier, drove our ani- 
mals into the yard beside the corral. For 
some reason we had not been seen from the 
cabin, so Price walked on to the door, while I 
mounted guard over the burros. From a seat 
in the sun on an old hen-coop I could watch 
them as they nibbled the short grass, while 
from the cabin came peals of laughter, denot- 
ing that Price had fallen among friends who 
were keeping Christmas festival. 

I was willing enough to rest outside, know- 
ing that we had reached a hospitable roof and 
that a dinner was assured. Sitting there for 
some time, I presently began to question 
what was keeping Price, when the cabin-door 
opened and two women appeared. As they 
walked down the footpath to the gate, I gath- 
ered that they were neighbors returning from 
a Christmas call. But this was the least inter- 
esting inference, and I was totally at a loss 
for others. The wonder grew as they came 
nearer. They were young and faultlessly 
dressed, and one of them was beautiful. 



" A burro-puncher" 159 

Their dress was of the kind that charms with 
its perfect simplicity and the air of natural 
distinction with which it is worn. They 
rested frank eyes on me for a moment as they 
passed and nodded pleasantly, speaking their 
thanks with sweet voices, as I stood holding 
open the gate. Who they were remained a 
mystery, and I was content to have it so, for 
they left me not without a sense of Christmas 
visitation, which stirred again the memories 
of my own " God's country." 

The ranchman was a Virginian, tall, fair- 
eyed, and soft of speech, and when he and 
Price came out together they were stanch 
friends on the strength of an earlier acquaint- 
ance, and we had the freedom of the ranch. 
We unpacked and corralled the animals and 
then made ready for dinner. Not for two 
days had we tasted food, and now we were 
seated with our host and hostess and their two 
sons at a table which groaned under sweet 
potatoes and roast corn and piles of bread and 
great dishes full of steaming " hog and 
hominy," and with it all, the best of Christmas 
cheer. For two days we stayed at the Yir- 



160 "A burro-puncher" 

ginian's ranch and then, having purchased 
from him a fresh store of food, we resumed the 
march by way of the Tonto Basin and Fort 
McDowell to Phoenix. 

On ]STew-year's-day we were camped at Fort 
McDowell; and, when we set out early on the 
next morning, there remained but about thirty 
miles to Phoenix, so we resolved to cover it in a 
single march. Mght found us still some miles 
from the city, but the night was clear and 
flooded with moonlight. The moon made 
plain the way, yet played fantastically over 
"the face of the country. Long reaches of 
white sand were converted into Arabian des- 
erts, with pilgrim caravans moving across 
them; the irrigated ranches were transformed 
into tropical gardens, whose luxuriance was 
heightened by the exquisite softness of the 
night, and then there were stretches of uncom- 
promising Arizona desert, dusty and cactus- 
grown and redolent of alkali. 

It was nearing midnight when we entered 
the town. Price directed the way to a corral 
where he was known, and where we left the 
animals feasting on fresh alfalfa, while we 



161 



fared forth to see his friends. It was precise- 
ly as though Price had invited me around to 
his club. He led the way to a saloon, and as 
we entered it, I saw at once its typical char- 
acter. At the left of the entrance was a bar, 
gorgeous with mirrors and cut glass, while 
down the deep recesses of the room were faro 
and roulette tables and tables for poker. The 
groups about them were formed of " cow- 
punchers/' and prospectors and " Greasers " 
and Chinamen, and even Indians, all mingling 
and intermingling with a freedom that sug- 
gested that in gambling there is a touch of 
nature that makes the whole world kin. 

But more immediately interesting to us was 
a group which stood beside the bar. It was 
made up, as I found, of politicians, high in 
territorial office, all of whom knew Price and 
hailed him cordially while asking after his 
luck. Por some time we stood talking with 
them, then one of their number, himself not a 
politician but a business man, proposed our 
joining him at supper. We accepted, I the 
more delightedly because he, of all the group, 
had most attracted me. Tall and very hand- 



162 "a burro-puncher" 

some, lie had the bearing of a gentleman, and 
what he told me of himself confirmed my own 
impression of a richly varied past. Far into 
the night we talked, and I could well believe 
him when he said that the fascination of the 
life which he had led on the frontier had so far 
grown upon him that, while he was glad to go 
back at times to his former home in New York, 
he could no longer remain contented there, 
hearing as he always did after a few months, 
at most, the call back to the wild freedom of 
the plains. It was under the spell of what 
he said, enforced by my little experience as a 
" burro-puncher," that I went to sleep that 
night on a bed of alfalfa in the corral; and 
when I wakened in the morning and found let- 
ters urging my return to the East, I was con- 
scious of an indifference to the idea which was 
wholly new to my experience. 



INCIDENTS OP THE SLUMS 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

IF anything is wanting to darken the pict- 
ure of life in city slums, it is a sense of 
the needlessness of much of the suffering. 
And this is the sense which I cannot escape in 
looking back upon a winter in Chicago, from 
the vantage point of nearly a year of walking 
and working through regions west of that city. 
I left Chicago in May of 1892, and entered 
San Francisco in February of the following 
year, having gone on foot, in the meantime, 
through Illinois and southern Minnesota and 
western Iowa, and almost from end to end of 
Nebraska and Colorado and through some of 
New Mexico and much of Arizona and Cali- 
fornia. It was not in the character of a 
tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the 
journey; and the only notable fact about it was 
that I not only never lacked for labor, but I 

almost never had to ask for it, having scores of 
165 



166 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

opportunities of work pressed upon me by em- 
ployers hard up for hands. I am well aware 
of the abnormal in my experiment and of its 
little worth apart from the value of experi- 
ence to myself, and I know how slight a con- 
nection with the deeper causes which give rise 
to congestion in labor centres the fact of ready 
employment in the country may have. Yet, 
as one result of personal contact, I cannot help 
seeing much of the misery of the mass in the 
light of individuals suffering wretchedly for 
want of knowledge of a better chance. 

We speak in old-fashioned phrase of a city's 
slums as though they were a local evil in the 
town, quite remote in connection with the rest 
of the corporate whole, while in truth we 
know, in our haunting, new-found knowledge 
of social solidarity, that they form a sore which 
denotes disease in every part of the body 
politic. The conviction grows upon us that it 
is often at the cost of much suffering to our 
kind that we have food to eat and raiment to 
put on, and the immunity from personal re- 
sponsibility which once we felt in paying high 
prices for our wares is fast being undermined 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 167 

by increased acquaintance with the ramifica- 
tions of the " sweating system." Indeed, we 
seem to see that, from the very frame of 
things, if one enjoys, another suffers, and that 
the unwitting oppressors of the poor are often 
the poor themselves, while the destruction of 
the poor is their poverty. Men tell us that 
things were growing worse, and that hope lies 
that way, because it points to ultimate dissolu- 
tion and a new order. I find it impossible to 
share this form of optimism, and I cannot see 
that things are really getting worse, but rather 
incomparably better as measured, for example, 
by the standard of the last century of indus- 
trial progress. And so far from seeing hope in 
a belief that matters are getting worse, I find 
it rather in the view that much that is worst 
in modern life is fast becoming intolerable in 
a society which grows increasingly conscious 
of vital interdependence and relationship. 
Meanwhile the concrete facts remain, and here 
is a glimpse of some of them as they appear 
in a partial record of fragments of two days' 
experience in Chicago. 

I was working as a hand-truckman in a fac- 



168 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

tory far out on Blue Island Avenue. My 
wages were $1.50 a day, and I was paying for 
board and lodging, in a tenement across the 
way, $4.25 a week. As one result, I was sav- 
ing money and would soon be able to leave the 
job and write up my notes, while widening my 
acquaintance with the town before looking for 
other work. Already I had a little knowl- 
edge of the city. For two weeks after enter- 
ing it I had been among its unemployed and 
had suffered some and had seen the real suffer- 
ing among others of my class, before I found 
occupation in a West-side factory. 

It was during those two weeks that I came 
to know a widow, with whom this tale is first 
concerned. I met her early in December; it 
was now nearing the end of January, and we 
factory hands were marking with delight the 
lengthening of the days, for we were begin- 
ning to have a little daylight left when work 
was over. At last one afternoon the setting 
sun came pouring through the kitchen window 
while we were washing up for supper at Mrs. 
Schultz's boarding-house. That was because 
it was Saturday, and we had quit at five 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 169 

o'clock, being given, as was the custom in the 
factory, a half hour on Saturday afternoons. 

The usual week's end excitement was run- 
ning high among the men. Gibes and louder 
talk than common were rife, as black hands 
and faces came white from soap and successive 
basins of hot water. Some of the men were 
going in the evening to a " show," others to a 
" fancy-dress ball," and a few were saying 
nothing. We scattered widely after supper, 
leaving the house to the family, which must 
have been a welcome change to them, for gen- 
erally, through the week, we all foregathered 
in the sitting-room at night and romped with 
the children and played cards until bed-time. 

Mrs. Stone will serve as the widow's name, 
and my first errand that evening took me to 
her home, which was in the basement of a 
building on Boston Avenue. "We were both 
concerned in pressing a claim which she had 
upon her husband's people, a highly just 
claim, I thought ; for he had deserted her some 
time before his death, leaving her alone in the 
support of herself and their two children. 
Why she had ever come to the city, I could 



170 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

never make clearly out, beyond what had 
seemed to be to her a strong appeal to her 
reason that, if she must make her own living 
and the children's, she could hope to do it 
better in town than in the country where she 
was born and bred. And the marvel was that 
she had succeeded in keeping them all alive. 
The city had, of course, furnished an awful 
disillusionment. The children proved an in- 
superable barrier to employment at domestic 
service, and, failing to find any other labor, she 
was rescued finally from starvation by getting 
a job from a " sweater." She deserved suc- 
cess, for she was an heroic creature. To hear 
her describe the struggle, you would gather 
that hers had been the best of luck. She 
merely wanted a chance to work, so that they 
might live; and had she not found it, just 
when she thought, for lack of it, that they 
must starve? 

From the sweater's shop she would carry the 
goods two miles to her home, walking both 
ways, for she could not afford car-fare. Then 
all day and through much of the night she 
made the garments. They were boys' waists, 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 171 

and the materials, ready cut, besides the neces- 
sary thread and buttons, were furnished her. 
There was left for her to do all the remaining 
work, down to sewing on the buttons and mak- 
ing the button-holes, and she was paid for the 
finished waists at the rate of thirty-five cents 
a dozen. 

It was hard, she did admit, to feed and 
clothe her family and pay the rent on a wage- 
rate like that, and she was near to going under 
when another and a crowning stroke of fortune 
fell. In answer to a notice tacked on her door, 
two women, who worked in a neighboring 
book-bindery, applied for board, and each 
agreed to pay two dollars a week. The five 
then lived together in the basement-room, 
whose furniture consisted chiefly of dry-goods 
boxes, but the boarders took kindly to the 
home and the children, and things had gone 
comfortably ever since. Gradually the chil- 
dren, a boy of nine and a girl two years 
younger, were learning to help at some of the 
simpler forms of sewing and in the house- 
work. 

This, I beg to interpolate, was the small be- 



172 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

ginning of Mrs. Stone's success. Having 
shrewdness as well as energy, she soon discov- 
ered that keeping boarders was more profitable 
than making waists, and so she developed that 
side of her enterprise. When I saw her last, 
in the following May, she was mistress of a 
well-appointed mechanics' boarding-house on 
Milwaukee Avenue, but her troubles had 
taken new form, for the contamination of the 
slums had begun to appear in her son, who was 
fast developing into an incorrigible, and she 
had sent for me in order to consult about a 
plan of placing him in a reformatory. 

But to return to the February evening, on 
which I called to talk with Mrs. Stone about a 
claim upon her husband's people: I found 
her at home. One ran little risk of failing to 
find Mrs. Stone at home, her engagements 
abroad being confined to trips to the sweater's 
shop for materials. I heard the swift clatter 
of her sewing-machine as I walked down the 
steps from the filthy pavement to the door 
of the basement where she lived. The room 
had always to me an effect of being brilliantly 
lighted. It was due to the illumination of 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 173 

two large lamps which were kept faultlessly 
clean and were burning often in the day as 
well as night, and in part to the general clean- 
liness of the room, not to mention the cheerful- 
ness which radiated from Mrs. Stone. She 
turned from her machine as I drew up an 
empty soap-box and sat down in front of her, 
and one would have thought, from the conta- 
gion of her manner, that she never knew any 
mood but one of hopeful courage. But she 
had no time to spare, and when our talk was 
ended, she turned again to work, while I went 
over to another corner and chatted with the 
children and the boarders. 

I was waiting for my friend Kovnitz, whom 
I had asked to meet me there. Kovnitz was 
himself employed in the same trade as Mrs. 
Stone, although in quite another branch of it. 
He was a coatmaker, and had been brought up 
to work under the sweating system. Much of 
the value of his acquaintance, apart from my 
personal liking for him, lay for me in his 
thorough knowledge of the trade. He was a 
socialist, and a very ardent one ; but his efforts 
for reform were directed mainly toward effect- 



174 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

ing organization among the workers of his 
kind, and with this I warmly sympathized. 
We were to go together in the evening to a 
gathering of the cloak-makers, and, when he 
appeared at Mrs. Stone's, we lost no time in 
starting for the meeting-place on the South- 
side. 

One was never at a loss for conversation 
with Kovnitz, but it was always conversation 
which had to do with the condition of his class. 
That was uppermost and foremost in his mind. 
Other things interested him only as they were 
related to that. Although a collectivist, he 
wasted little thought upon a future socialistic 
state, and he cared little for present concerted 
political action in his party. The one su- 
preme necessity, in his view, was that all wage- 
earners should be led to act together as a class, 
until their predominance in an industrial age 
is recognized. When once wage-workers are 
known to be the most powerful as a class, then 
social institutions will change in accordance 
with their interests. It was curious to see 
how this, the central principle of his creed, ab- 
sorbed him. It was the criterion of all his 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 175 

judgments, and it gave color and meaning to 
everything lie saw. Generally lie noticed 
little of what was about him. The inferno of 
those city streets at night seemed not to im- 
press him as we passed. All the varied play 
of life upon them did not divert him from pre- 
occupation in what he was telling me of the 
work of organization among wage-earners. 
Once only his attention was drawn off, and 
even then his habitual cast of thought moulded 
the new impression. In glancing up, his eyes 
had fallen upon a building newly occupied as 
a department store. It was Saturday evening, 
and, for some reason, the place was still open. 
Streams of shoppers were entering the doors 
and pouring from them. More even than by 
day, the store gave at night an impression of 
a bee-hive in full activity. The swarming of 
the crowds within, the lights from a hundred 
windows, and the brave array of goods formed 
the outer picture. But Kovnitz said nothing 
of that. 

" There are two men in that store who are as 
different in general character as men can be," 
he remarked to me, as we stood at the curb. 



176 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

" One of them/' he went on, " is a man of 
scholarly instincts. He is a disciple of Kant, 
and knows the Kantian philosophy well. Just 
now he is giving his leisure to reading Goethe. 
He is an enthusiast in philosophy and litera- 
ture, and a man of really fine sensibilities. 
The other chap is a human brute, and looks it. 
Nothing interests him beyond his business and 
his dissipations. Both of these men are at 
the head of departments of ready-made gar- 
ments in the store, and I know that they both 
draw salaries of $4,000 a year. They have 
good business heads, and manage their depart- 
ments well, but what makes them specially val- 
uable to their employers is the fact that they 
know thoroughly the sweating system. They 
keep carefully informed on the condition of 
the labor market, and the demand for work; 
and, when the competition is keenest among 
the sub-contractors and the workers, they know 
how to pit the bidders against one another, 
until the tasks are finally let out at the. low- 
est possible figures. Mrs. Stone is making 
boys' waists for thirty-five cents a dozen, and 
there are more than 20,000 sweatshops in Chi- 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 177 

cago where similar prices prevail, and Chicago 
is but one of a score of cities in this country 
where sweating is in vogue." 

Late that night, after the labor meeting, I 
was passing the store again. I was alone, for 
Kovnitz had gone home another way. The 
street lay quiet, and almost deserted through 
its length, and I could hear the echo of my 
tread under the glare of electrics. The sound 
of jangling music came faintly from a long 
line of almost continuous saloons. There was 
some movement in front of them which con- 
trasted sharply with the general desertion of 
the street. 

One is rarely at a loss to trace the anteced- 
ents of a sharp impression, and I can remem- 
ber clearly that I was conscious of a man and 
woman who stood talking in low tones as I 
passed, and who disappeared that moment into 
an open passage. The next instant I was 
keenly alive to them, for I heard the woman 
scream as though in mortal fear, and turn- 
ing, I saw the man dragging her violently out 
upon the pavement. Events followed one an- 
other then in quick succession. I was near 



178 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

enough to watch them at close range, and I had 
the sense of interpreting them as they moved. 
I saw the instant flash of anger in the face of a 
young mechanic who stood near, and the first 
quick thrust of his arm which sent the man 
reeling from the girl, then the swift onslaught 
of the two men, and I heard the rain of blows 
and oaths, and the loud asseverations of the one 
attacked that he was an officer, while the 
crowd thickened about them, and the girl 
pleaded piteously to be loosed from the grasp 
of someone who held her. 

Two officers in uniform came down upon us 
from opposite quarters, and the fighting gave 
way to noisy explanations. It developed then 
that the attack had been made upon an officer 
in citizens' clothes who was doing detective 
duty against street-walkers. But he was 
wholly to blame for the disturbance, I 
thought; for he had handled his prisoner with 
needless violence, and the blow from the me- 
chanic was so obviously the instinctive, chival- 
rous act of a man who sees a woman ill-treated. 
Technically, however, he was guilty of " re- 
sisting an officer while in the discharge of his 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 179 

duty," and he must answer for it, so that the 
group which started for the Harrison Street 
Station-house was made up of the three offi- 
cers, the girl, the mechanic, and four or five 
stragglers, of whom I was one. 

It was easy to learn at the station what 
course the case had taken. Both prisoners 
were admitted to bail, and bondsmen having 
been found, they went free that night under a 
charge to appear before the court on a certain 
morning of the following week. When the 
morning came I was on hand too, for by that 
time I had given up my job in the factory. 

I went early, not knowing at what hour the 
case might come up, and, although there were 
already many persons seated on the wooden 
forms, I looked carefully through both of the 
court-rooms without seeing those in whom my 
interest lay. Finding a vacant seat in the 
inner room, I sat there, watching intently the 
changing groups at the bar. They were made 
up of the commonest criminals of the town, 
and it was rare that a novice appeared to dis- 
turb the atmosphere of perfect naturalness. 
Law-breakers they were without question ; the 



180 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

magistrate knew them as well as the police, 
and frequently he spoke to them by familiar 
names, reminding them of earlier warnings 
and threatening them with severer penalties 
for the future. It was a sort of clearing-house, 
where a certain residuum of habitual criminals 
was dealt with by a doctrine of averages in an 
effort to regulate and control the crime in- 
evitable in a great city. 

Sitting beside me on the form was a young 
girl, plainly dressed, with an air of perfect 
neatness. Her gloved hands lay folded in her 
lap and in one of them she held a purse. Her 
mackintosh of dark material was unbuttoned 
and thrown open, with the cape falling loosely 
over her arms. It was the trimness of her hair 
and a certain trig simplicity in her hat 
which struck me first, and, when she spoke, 
the tone and manner were in keeping with her 
quietness of dress. 

" Will you tell me, please, what time it is? " 
she asked, and, having learned the hour, 
" What are you up for? " she continued, 
abruptly. 

There was nothing about her which had in 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 181 

the least prepared me for the question, and I 
floundered about in an explanation that I was 
there merely out of interest in a case which I 
expected to come up in the course of the morn- 
ing. 

She smiled wearily at that, regarding me 
with eyes which asked whether I knew how 
young I was and how dreary that sort of thing 
made her feel. I was afraid that I had cut 
short the conversation and was delighted when 
she continued, quite simply: 

" Tm up for shop-lifting. It was at Walk- 
er's, and it was the hardest luck, for I had 
everything well concealed. But they sus- 
pected me, and, when they brought me here, 
the matron searched me and soon found the 
goods. And there I was, red-handed! Now 
I'm trying to think up some story, but the 
judge knows me and he warned me well last 
time." 

It was charming then, for we fell to talking 
as though we had known each other long. 
Her small gray eyes that looked straight into 
mine were as frank and innocent as a child's. 
There was little beauty but an entire com- 



182 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

posure in the lines of her face, heightened by 
a natural pallor very becoming to her. Her 
features betrayed no nervousness, and one saw 
the change of feeling only in her eyes and in a 
subtle quality in her smile which was expres- 
sive and sometimes sweet. 

We were two children, who had met by 
chance, and, sitting there in the dingy light of 
a station-house court-room, we were presently 
unaware of anything but the fact that we had 
a great deal to tell each other. I told her of 
the mechanic and the girl, and she half be- 
lieved me, and, in turn, began to tell me of 
herself. There was no system in her story, 
only a simple sequence of spontaneity that 
charmed me. I had but to listen and watch 
her inscrutable face and ask questions where 
my dull intuitions were at fault. In the fore- 
ground was the incident of shop-lifting, and 
running from that was a chain of events which 
led back inevitably into the distant perspective 
of memory. She had never an air of giving 
me her confidence, rather of speaking freely 
as man to man. 

It was bad to be caught at shop-lifting, and 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 183 

the more annoying because she had so often 
carried it off with success. At the best, shop- 
lifting was a wretched business, entailing 
much anxiety both in getting and disposing of 
the goods. But there was the stubborn fact 
that one must live. Of course she had worked 
as a shop-girl earning $3.50 a week. And 
here she began to count up on her fingers the 
items of bare subsistence with their cost, and 
the smile with which she concluded was 
touched with the question, " When you have 
spent your all upon mere living, what have 
you left to live on? " There had been some- 
thing of this idea in her protest to her em- 
ployer, and he met her frankly with the assur- 
ance that, if she found it impossible to live on 
her wages, it would give him pleasure to intro- 
duce her to a " gentleman friend." Other 
employments which were open to her were no 
better in point of wages; some of them were 
not so good, but they were all alike in offering 
relief by the way suggested at the department 
store. 

" I'm not what you'd call a ' good girl,' " she 
said, " only, you know, I'd so much rather 
die than do that." 



184 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

And the revulsion of the child's nature 
against what to her was this infinite terror led 
her to tell me of her bringing up. Her mem- 
ory did not go back to the beginning of her 
stay in a convent near Dublin, where her par- 
ents placed her to be taught. Life had begun 
for her in the peaceful routine of the sister- 
hood. All her deepest impressions were got 
there, and, when as a child of twelve, she came 
out to emigrate with her people to America, 
she was instantly in a new world on leaving the 
convent walls. It had been an almost over- 
whelming discovery to her to find that the 
standards of goodness and purity which pre- 
vailed within were apparently almost unknown 
outside the convent. It staggered her intel- 
ligence as a child, and, during a long experi- 
ence of earning her living as a girl, she had 
slowly constructed a philosophy of life which 
was drawn from the facts of hard struggle 
with a world which seemed bent upon com- 
passing her ruin. 

She spoke reverently of the teachings of the 
sisters, and of the influence of their devoted 
work. " But you know," she added, " I can- 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 185 

not believe any longer that only those are 
Christians who are members of the Catholic 
Church, and that all others will be lost. The 
world would be too horrible, if that were true. 
To be a Christian must be simply to follow 
Christ." 

It was from this revery that we were roused 
by the loud calling of her name. I watched 
her walk to the bar and stand there with per- 
fect composure, while the clerk read the in- 
dictment, and the witnesses were mechanically 
sworn, and the girl was heard, and the magis- 
trate gave his verdict. 

" Minnie," he said, in closing, " I told you, 
when you were here last, that the next time 
you came up, you should go to the Bridewell, 
and now to the Bridewell you shall go. Min- 
nie, why can't a smart girl like you be 
decent? " 

Her profile was toward me, and I saw a 
faint smile play for a moment on the clear 
lines of her face. 

" Your honor," she replied, " it is a little 
late now, but when I began to earn my living 
I wanted nothing so much as the chance to be 
decent." 



186 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

Meanwhile, two reporters were quickly 
sketching her where she stood — a singularly 
well-poised figure — while others were noting 
the salient facts of the case; for it was a good 
" story," having already attracted attention. 
With wide notoriety as a thief, she went to 
prison that day, and, when she came out, a 
not too hospitable world was the more on its 
guard against her. An officer accompanied 
her from the room, but she did not forget to 
nod to me and smile as she passed out. 

Engrossed as I had been in Minnie, I had 
not noticed the coming of the mechanic and 
the girl whose case had drawn me there. I 
saw them now when I looked around. The 
sight of the girl was perplexing at first, for she 
sat with another woman at the end of a neigh- 
boring form, and they looked so much alike 
that I could not distinguish the one who was 
there on trial. Crossing the passage, I asked 
leave to sit beside them. They drew up at 
once to make room for me, and I saw then that 
the girl next me was the prisoner. The other 
was a twin sister, as she frankly told me, and 
the resemblance fully sustained her. I ex- 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 187 

plained that I had come to the station-house 
because I happened to see the affair of a few 
nights before, and was anxious to find what 
course it would take in court. The girl agreed 
with me that the mechanic was in no way to 
blame. 

" He never know'd that it was an officer that 
was draggin' me down the steps, and out into 
the street. I never know'd it neither till I see 
his star under his coat. I thought he was 
crazy, and was goin' to kill me like c Jack 
the Ripper.' " She was a girl in age, and 
obviously one of the most helpless of her 
order. 

There is a common impression that such 
women are attracted to their ruin by vanity 
and a love of dress. You lose that idea among 
the wrecks who walk the city streets at night. 
Anything to flatter their vanity or to gratify 
their taste is the least likely of all possible 
experiences to most of them. It is a matter 
of keeping soul and body together. Some are 
dexterous pick-pockets, who make large hauls 
at times — not always, however, for them- 
selves; most are ill-fed, ill-dressed slaves, who, 



188 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

when their tributes are paid, are penniless. 
Any degree of viciousness may be found 
among them, and you may find as well a high 
degree of the innocence of the unmoral, the 
sense of morality completely lost in the in- 
stinct of self-preservation. 

The girl beside me was like fragile porce- 
lain, her thin lips and nostrils and delicate skin 
all marred by a pasty, white unwholesomeness. 
There was a hectic flush in her sister's face and 
her eyes were ablaze with disease. We were 
talking about the case and drifted naturally 
into further talk about themselves. They 
were orphans and had long supported them- 
selves by working in a tobacco factory, but 
there their health had failed, and when they 
were well enough to work again, they found 
employment in a laundry. To supplement 
the " sweating " wages, they had taken to 
street-walking, and then their end was near. 
But they spoke as frankly of this last as a 
" business " as of the earlier occupations, and 
you saw that, to their thinking, it was only 
a degree more complete a sale of soul and 
body. 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 189 

" But business is poor," the ill sister was 
saying, presently, " and I ain't very well, 
which I wouldn't mind, but there's my baby, 
and, if anything happens to me, who's goin' to 
take care of him? You don't think I've got 
consumption, do you? " And she turned 
upon me a face with the cheeks sunk to the 
bone and the eyes dilating with the fire which 
was burning out her life. 

When our case came up, it went through 
without a hitch. The officer told his story 
with a pompousness that was due to wounded 
pride and he dwelt over-much upon his efforts 
to make his assailant understand from the first 
that he himself was a member of the force. 
The girl was simplicity and frankness itself; 
not an effort to conceal her character, but a 
straightforwardness about the officer's brutal 
roughness which threw it into strong relief. 
But the young mechanic was the best. He 
was new to courts as he abundantly proved, 
and when his turn came to testify, he stood 
licking his dry lips like one with stag^-fright. 
Speech came haltingly from him at the first, 
while his face flushed, but the sense of injustice 



190 INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 

urged him on to a perfectly clear statement of 
how, while " doing the town," he had seen 
this girl ill-treated and had struck the man 
without knowing that he was an officer. 

I knew that all was well, for I saw a smile 
pass vaguely now and tjien over the magis- 
trate's face, and when he spoke, the girl was 
dismissed with a fine and the young mechanic 
with a friendly warning against " doing 
the town," while the officer was held up 
in open court for reproof and told that, if 
he knew no better how to handle his prison- 
ers, he was ignorant of the first principles 
of the special service to which he had been 
assigned. 

It is only a few steps from the station-house 
to the heart of the business section of the city. 
I passed through it now, as I often did, for 
the sake of the feeling that it gives one of the 
reach and strength of the industrial forces 
which are centred there. Here is no sense of 
failure or of loss, but of energy and skill 
trained to high efficiency in the co-operation 
of productive powers. Men are there produc- 
ing for all mankind, and in spite of the pres- 



INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 191 

ent waste of human life, I cannot doubt that, 
with the problems of production so widely 
solved, the genius of the race is turning 
surely to the subtler questions of a fairer 
distribution. 



SEP 28 1901 



